Here’s another topic I’m addressing elsewhere in my book: the intersection between new media and plagiarism. My department, like most, has had continuing discussions of this problem. The recent WPA-list discussion on this was distributed to our faculty, including this link to this WSU site with a definition of plagiarism.

It is interesting to note the site clearly states that material in the public domain does not need to be cited. Elsewhere, they note, as should be obvious, that plagiarism is an extension of copyright law.

Well that raises a curious problem. With the rise of Creative Commons, copyleft, and open source in general, there is a fair amount of material out there in the public domain. I assure you that my colleagues would insist on this material being cited; that they would view it as plagiarism otherwise. However, perhaps they are not in a position to make this demand.

Certainly, part of the issue here is that the producers of public domain work who have renounced any claim to copyright are presenting a competing view of composition. As Jeff Rice noted there

t isn’t? We seem to go down this path over and over and the same old arguments regarding policing student work surface
each time. Students raised in digital culture know that cutting and pasting is SMART. They see it in film, video, and the Web; they hear it in music. They read it in the newspaper (journalism cuts and pastes all the time). Its embedded in the computer systems they use for work, fun, and school. And when they start taking Humanities classes, luddite positions don’t make a difference. The liberal (and non-digital) tradition is complete with examples galore of cutting and pasting.

“But it’s not the same,” someone will say. It is the same. We just insist it’s not and spend all our time framing cutting and pasting as a question of “ethics” in the voice of Mr Macky from South Park: Kids, stealing’s bad.

However I would add this context. As Jeff notes, yes technology has made this process easier and more obvious, but we have always composed by cutting and pasting. It is simply that we have occluded this fact for the kinds of logocentric reasons Derrida writes about, but also because of the requirements of the marketplace.

The challenge “open source” composition presents to us is to help students understand how writing emerges from writing, how they can learn from the integration of material and produce new content that then becomes part of the community of intellectual resources.

In other words, rather than stopping “plagiarism,” we might concentrate on teaching students how to do it well, like we do.