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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.'"
You could write an article about how murder helped win the American revolution. True, but relevant?
So, two and half centuries ago, there were quite different values in place. What's so shocking about it?
I don't have a sig.
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.
Plagiarize
Let no one else's work evade your eyes
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So don't shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize
Only be sure always to call it please "research"
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.
Not much changed. These days newspapers across the world (especially English-language papers) have identical articles too. They just take it from "the wire" and reprint it without any editing usually. I literally see the same articles in a local Hong Kong paper that I see later linked from /. so some US online paper.
The only difference is that nowadays this exchange goes a lot faster, and that papers usually pay for the privilege.
The practise was known as 'boilerplate'. Smaller newspapers would buy printing plates from larger newspapers and only add their own title block and a few local stories. That doesn't mean plagiarism though - it was a sale.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Newspapers of the time could have obtained the same results without any plagiarism (e.g. by hiring field correspondents).
The alleged cause-effect relationship exists only in the author's obviously underpowered mind.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
There's a lot to be said here about the ends you're trying to achieve. Getting the news of the Boston Massacre out was more important than who makes the money selling the paper. There's also the consideration that republication happened in markets that weren't competing with the original source newspaper. In a time when horse and buggy was the primary mode of transportation, newspapers in other cities reprinting the stories was just how the story was distributed. There was no way to reach everyone, and telling how atrocious the British were being was everyone's goal.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
I don't doubt that plagiarism was the order of the day(even in academia, the idea that plagiarism is a bad thing hardly goes back to the beginning); but I would be curious to know why...
The incentive behind copying things is pretty obvious; but mere copying isn't plagiarism. It takes lack of attribution to get to that level, and the incentive to not attribute isn't nearly as obvious. If I'm a newspaper editor in Baltimore, reprinting a story from a Boston paper, why wouldn't I include "As lately printed in ye Boston Herald" to assure my readers that they were getting authentic coverage from the scene, rather than me making shit up?
with stories about plagiarism and how "its okay" or "rooted in history" I wonder at the timing. After all it wasn't like someone at a major news magazine recently got stung. Astroturfing anyone?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Fareed Zakaria has kidnapped samzenpus.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Who's to say there was not an agreements in place that allowed the sharing of newspaper articles without attributing to the source, it may be that as long as no one put their name atop the article that it was acceptable with the other papers. Writing anything anti-colonial may not have been attributed to the writer to protect the writer from imprisonment or the gallows. Many of the major newspapers owners did know each other and were sympathetic to the cause so a simple arrangement is a very likely scenario. It is more likely that this was a distributed propaganda network then a shift in plagiarism values. Unless other articles not related to the revolution can be found to be treated in the same way before, during, and after the revolution it would be reckless to call this a change in values.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
It seems copying even went as far as picking a flag...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_United_States#History
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.
--
BMO
So now plagiarism is okay, and a good thing? But, ..., don't we have all these laws against plagiarizing someone else's work? That means it's bad.... But, our founding fathers plagiarized, so that means it's good to .... Hmm... , let me think about this, ...., ...., .....***BOOM!!!*** (head explodes)
...I will put my modern values into the past and judge people based on today's criteria story. If it was accepted practice back then you should STFU. You should also not promote it as a model of how to do things today. You can't go back to that exact time and place.
So let me see if I understand:
Copyright violation helped people resist the rightful government of the time?
Oh THAT'S going to be helpful in the discussion about the need to reduce/limit copyright. /tinfoil hat
-Styopa
I don't think that the missing attribution was relevant to the described effect. Even if proper credit would have been given, the stories would have spread quickly. The implicit connection between plagiarism and the US revolution is simpliy invalid.
I can't count the number of times I've copied some code from a web site and disassembled it to learn how it works. I've never just flat-out cut and pasted code without permission to go on a production site, but that initial copy to learn things would no doubt be considered "plagiarism" (or at the very least copyright infringement) by today's hyper-legal norms.
The free flow of information benefits everyone, but that benefit rarely comes all at once from a single mind. More often, it takes lots of incremental, standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants improvements to make something really valuable. As the founders of the Internet and Linux have shown us, we all get more by giving a little. Better to have 1% of a watermelon than 100% of a raisin.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
So whats their agenda with this piece?
If this is meant to be a "Why is this on Slashdot"- Well, it's like this: The only way we can know that older societies had different values is if we can read about it. Ok?
Anyway, it's quite interesting that plagiarism is apparently the one thing you can do to get the punishment of shunning. Shunning was the practice of removing an individual from the good graces or even contact of the rest of a given society (whether that be a church, a village, or whatever).
From a NPOV, it's quite interesting that almost every sin that would have resulted in shunning in the old day is now considered not a big deal. On the other hand, since human beings have a need to have some kind of moral base, a new sin (plagiarism) has been devised which if you commit it, you can be banished forever from your journalistic community.
It's just quite interesting that instead of saying that some guy isn't that good of a writer if he can't make up his own stuff, it's supposed that he committed a grave moral sin.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
This wouldn't get past a peer review.
I believe all the reports were attributed to he Sam Pseudonym and none of the other papers had writers claiming the work as their own. Moreover, it appears there was same sharing arrangement between most if not all of the papers involved.
This is not the world's clearest case of plagiarism.
If the cheerleader has a gun, why don't the three rapists have one too?
So, three armed serial rapists and an one armed cheerleader. I fail to see how this situation leads to a freer cheerleader.
Although today the stigma of lifting passages
First guess: 19th century name for "elevator"
Second guess: stirring paragraphs
Third guess after reading headline: plagiarism
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Even worse, I hear some if not all of the founding fathers supported their local Chick-Fil-A!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Newspapers of the time could have obtained the same results without any plagiarism ...
Absolutely correct.
... (e.g. by hiring field correspondents).
No. They simply needed to cite the original author.
The alleged cause-effect relationship exists only in the author's obviously underpowered mind.
Certainly the relationship only exists in the author's mind and not in reality. The personal attack diminishes your argument.
There's a lot to be said here about the ends you're trying to achieve. Getting the news of the Boston Massacre out was more important than who makes the money selling the paper. There's also the consideration that republication happened in markets that weren't competing with the original source newspaper. In a time when horse and buggy was the primary mode of transportation, newspapers in other cities reprinting the stories was just how the story was distributed. There was no way to reach everyone, and telling how atrocious the British were being was everyone's goal.
Citing the original author would not slow the news, cause papers not to sell, etc. Plagiarism contributed nothing.
Like with the Gannett chain of local newspapers?
So in other words, not too different from the modern "wire reports" by AP or Reuters.
And it is most likely true that to some extent the notion of authorship with regards to news was much more fungible in the 18th century America than it was today.
It is also true that development of practices and technologies recognizeable as print syndication didn't really develop until th e19th century.
But it is also true that various publishers and authors did get their panties in a twist when their competitors stole their output word for word. Were this not the case, the US Constitution would not have explicitly given Congress the right to set terms for patents and copyrights.
Moreover, the English word plagiarism repleat with most of its current connotations dates back at least to the 17th century. And it's based on Latin that seems to have been coined in the 1st century. It is not a new idea. It's rigorous application to journalism and academia may be new but all you have to do is read letters from various newspaper publishers from the Revolutionary era to see that those being plagiarized did not feel as warm as fuzzy about the practice as those doing the plagiarizing.
Plagiarism is claiming you wrote something that you didn't. Copying something without permission isn't plagiarism unless you are claiming that the copied material is written by you; someone who torrents the Avengers film isn't considered to be committing plagiarism, even by the MPAA. If you copy an account of the Boston Tea Party written by an eyewitness, but you don't claim to be that eyewitness, you're not committing plagiarism at all.
but I'll sue you if you steal from me.