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In Argentina, Law Against Plagiarism Plagiarized
An anonymous reader writes "An Argentinian politician who introduced a law to send plagiarists to jail for three to eight years appears to have plagiarized the explanation of his bill directly from Wikipedia. The bulk of his explanation is three paragraphs that are taken, verbatim, from Wikipedia, without acknowledgment."
Do as I say don't do as I do, some politicians outside of Argentina also have that attitude ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Oh pleaaaaaaaaaaase enforce the penalty!
crazy dynamite monkey
Same ole' crap. "Stop stealing," says the thief.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
They should have done a Wikipedia search on the definition of irony.
It is a well written bill with unit tests included.
From TFA: Just to make sure someone didn't do the opposite and take the text of the introduction and make it the Wikipedia page, I looked, and as I'm typing this, the Wikipedia page hasn't been updated since April -- and it looks like the bulk of that page has actually been in place for quite some time. The bill was introduced on May 6th.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Plagiarism is not illegal in and of itself, except for where it's fraudulent
Plagiarism is always fraudulent. Its taking credit for work you did not do.
If we have rules for intellectual property, we should have them for intellectual fraud too.
Even in the "real world", where it should be (and is) perfectly fine to use someone elses work to solve a problem its still wrong to take credit for it.
Avoiding plagiarism doesn't mean you can't copy. It just means you can't take credit when you do.
Avoiding plagiarism is as simple as crediting the source.
While I was in seventh grade, I missed a week of school due to an illness. My first day back in English class, we were told spend the hour writing an essay about the evils of plagiarism. In retrospect, it's obvious what happened in my absence, but at the time I didn't know what the word meant, just that it was bad. So, I wrote an essay on the evils of communism, substituting the word plagiarism throughout. Yes, I discussed the possibility of godless plagiarists taking over the country and forcing a plagiarist regime upon the American people. I don't think we got a grade for it, but the teacher thought it was pretty hilarious.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Is there really room for crediting wikipedia in a legal bill? That seems silly to me. A law isn't an artistic endeavour. It has no direct commercial value. Applying the notion of IP to it makes no sense. I would have thought that the groupthink on Slashdot would lean towards disgust at this assumption of the blanket application of IP as a concept, but perhaps schadenfreude comes first.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Maybe he wrote the article?
From Wikipedia's Terms of Use:
"Wikimedia projects are required to grant broad permissions to the general public to re-distribute and re-use their contributions freely, as long as the use is attributed and the same freedom to re-use and re-distribute applies to any derivative works."
If he didn't cite Wikipedia (snicker) then he's at least violated their Terms of Use specifying a "Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0".. which I assume would be a copyright violation. But, IANAL.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
I propose a new word to describe this - wikiflagarism, the flagrant plagarism of wikipedia.
It is an portmanteau of a malapropism with a neologism, or a Malamanteau.
If we have rules for intellectual property, we should have them for intellectual fraud too.
I disagree. Plagiarism is morally wrong, but that doesn't mean it has to be illegal. There are lots of things that are morally wrong but not illegal (e.g. cheating on your spouse). That's the way it should be: for the vast majority of things, social norms and consequences (including public outcry, shaming, damage to reputation, etc.) are more than sufficient. Laws should only be enacted in those rare cases where the public safety or public good needs more protection. To do otherwise gives the lawmakers/enforcers too much power, and tends to turn every person into a criminal. (Does it really make sense to prosecute a college student who cheats on an essay? Or is flunking him sufficient?)
Really, we have far too many laws at present, and could stand to have many repealed. (The various "intellectual property" laws could certainly stand to be pruned-down, for instance.) I see no pressing social need for plagiarism to be illegal. (Plagiarism may be part of some larger fraud, but in those cases there are already other good laws (anti-fraud, truth-in-advertising, etc.) to address the real transgression.)
Plagiarizing Wikipedia is like singing Happy Birthday without paying royalties.
I live in Argentina and have read the original proposal. In fact he's proposing to up the penalties for misrepresenting, selling fake property as the original or selling property without that you don't own. Basically, you could sell fake goods, but you'd have to state it, thus, you'll be infringing on copyright. It's not so much about plagiarism as about misrepresentation and selling of fake goods as originals.
Having said that, I still think what he did was despicable and I seriously doubt his wits to be a representative. But which country is proud of its politicians? I would seriously consider moving there!
When I read this article, I immediately thought, what if he edited wikipedia (with a sockpuppet) to coincide with his bill before he introduced it? He can't be said to plagiarize his own text, after all.
The revision history of the article reveals that the current first three paragraphs were written on 19 April 2010 by Andreasmperu, who has been a prolific spanish wikipedia user for some years, is certainly not a sock puppet, is probably a woman, and may be from Peru.
Since I have disposed with the sock puppet theory, I feel comfortable embracing the much more humorous prevailing theory (pleasantly reinforcing my preconceptions about politicians) that Gerónimo Vargas Aignasse did in fact plagiarize the text of his plagiarism bill.