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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!
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.
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.
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
I think one other factor of the time that is being lost in our discussion is that printing a paper was a laborious and time consuming task back then, and the attribution information may have been lost to the second or third had recipients further down in the colonies. There was no cut and paste, unless you note the comment above with regards to smaller papers buying boilerplate from a larger paper. I think of this not as plagiarism so much as a primitive precursor to the AP.
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