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How Plagiarism Helped Win the American Revolution
Hugh Pickens writes "Although today the stigma of lifting passages can haunt media professionals forever, Revolutionary War Historian Todd Andrlik writes that 250 years ago stealing another reporter's work without credit was an acceptable form of journalism. In fact, plagiarism was a practice that helped unite the colonies and win the Revolutionary War. 'Without professional writing staffs of journalists or correspondents, eighteenth-century newspaper printers relied heavily on an intercolonial newspaper exchange system to fill their pages,' writes Andrlik. 'Printers often copied entire paragraphs or columns directly from other newspapers and frequently without attribution. As a result, identical news reports often appeared in multiple papers throughout America. This news-swapping technique, and resulting plagiarism, helped spread the ideas of liberty and uphold the colonists' resistance to British Parliament.' For example, an eyewitness account of the Boston Tea Party by 'An Impartial Observer' was first authored for the December 20, 1773, Boston Gazette, but was soon reprinted without edit or attribution in other New England newspapers. News of the Boston Massacre, Battle of Lexington and Concord, the treason of Benedict Arnold and practically every major event of the American Revolution circulated among the colonies much the same way. 'Thanks in no small part to this plagiarism, newspaper printers fanned the flames of rebellion and helped colonists realize the conflict was closer to home than perhaps they wanted to believe.'"
When the USA had no good authors, Charles Dickens used to be pirated heavily in the USA. http://www.doctorsyntax.net/2010/01/charles-dickens-get-your-cotton-pickin.html
This primed the print industry in the USA. USA started worrying about piracy only after they had their own authors who needed protection.
This is the reason it's hypocritical when the USA complains about piracy in the developing countries.
So, two and half centuries ago, there were quite different values in place. What's so shocking about it?
The shocking thing is that you guys still carry on with a constitution written at that time although your values have changed and large part of it are now so obsolete that it requires NRA money to keep it in place. While modern countries change theirs every generation or so to keep up with how we evolve.
As others have pointed out, any and all businesses that depend on copyright in the US at one time or another (mostly in their beginnings but some even now) depend upon some form of IP infringement. The movie industry moved from the east coast to the west in order to escape Edison and his patents over the motion picture, for example.
But it's the American Revolution! This insightful revelation shows that the Founding Fathers not only approved plagiarism, but that it was vitally important to their cause! Obviously, our modern politics are far out of line, having been corrupted by this silly "evolution of society" thing. This should be a clear message for Ron Paul and other politicians who actually care about the Founding Fathers' ideals that all copyright should be abandoned because it didn't matter in 1776.
It's perfectly clear that journalists back then had far higher ethical standards than modern journalists, because they wrote about the American Revolution! That immediately clears any doubt of their honesty, right? They wouldn't have copied something just because they could get away with it, but rather they did so out of a pure desire to spread the gospel of democracy.
Next week, we'll see the full story on how cholera was an effective means of population control, how slavery protected American companies from labor unions, and how an expensive and slow postal system encouraged only meaningful correspondence.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
This was not plagiarism. This is how things were done. Calling it plagiarism is demeaning to the efforts made to spread information back then. They didn't have the mass media that we have today. There weren't even analogous syndication services like AP and Reuters to syndicate columns and act as clearing houses for news articles. The societal infrastructure for syndication simply wasn't there. There were no methods for collecting royalties on articles except being paid through the local paper. Stuff got repeated and nobody got their panties in a twist. It's different today, because there are mechanisms in place for attribution and for people to get fairly paid.
Plagiarism is the *wrongful* appropriation of literary content. Back then it wasn't wrongful. Ergo, TFA calling it plagiarism is intellectually dishonest, at best.
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BMO
These days we call it syndication, and it's used to quash dissent, not encourage it.
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