A couple weeks ago I made a comment in class wondering how the relationship between the media machines and the public will change over time. If you think about it, as more and more media becomes concentrated and their power becomes greater and greater, they will most likely end up with more rights to protect their property and impose ludicrous fines on those who infringe upon it. However, I wonder if a) not if, but how the relationship between the public and the media will change, and also b) how the public will go about maintaining their free culture.
A free black market, if you will, already exists on the internet, and the more oppressive the companies become in tightening their property, the more "Robin Hood" torrent sites will pop up. iTunes struck a great compromise with this. $.99 is very reasonable. But the more they go after kids that make $10,000/year at $250,000 a pop, and the more they become money-grubbing and blood-thirsty, the less sympathy the public will have for them, and the less successful they ultimately will be.
Will there be, one day, a black market, where internet merchants distribute things for free with masked IP numbers? I don't know too much about it, but I know people who download these things, and then they have special software from keep the RIAA from pinging them. Maybe it has already begun...
Friday, March 28, 2008
Friday, March 7, 2008
Don't think of it as stealing...
So, another week in the books, and another abstract assignment which really allowed me to explore some things that I haven't had the opportunity to previously. For my plagiarism assignment, I chose to write about the lack of science and engineering graduates in the United States. It was a lot tougher than I expected.
My first plan was to find a paper that I previously wrote and touch it up by taking out a number of the citations, taking quotes out of passages, etc. However, I quickly found this to be impossible and unproductive. It was impossible because my voice and the voice of my quoted material were completely different. It would have been a dead giveaway.
Disgruntled, I decided to take a bunch of articles, and a passage from the book The World is Flat by Tom Friedman, and incorporate them into one. What was interesting about this was the effort it took to make my voice similar to theirs. My writing, because it largely citing statistics and making conclusions, was rather void of personality and flair. It blended it with theirs quite nicely. But it was harder to make my style fit theirs than if I would have written the paper on my own to begin with! Cheating should never make anything HARDER. :)
What I could have risked though, if I wrote it in my own voice, was unintentional plagiarism. Because I am not an expert on the topic, and because the research isn't my own, I would basically have to paraphrase any type of study I quoted. I don't know how much of that would equal plagiarism.
The other interesting aspect during my hunt for Courtney's work and vice versa was the plagiarism we found online. For example, Courtney took some of her work from MLB.com. However, when I found the material, it was at collegetickets.com, or something similar to that. It was a cheap knockoff of a website and they failed to quote MLB.com.
There was also specific phrase which Courtney googled from my paper, which led her an exact match in an National Science Board study. However, this exact sentence from the study also showed up word for word in Tom Friedman's book! Although it was one phrase, there was a hint of plagiarism, too. Now, perhaps it is hard to paraphrase the ENTIRE study, but he's a professional and a New York Times bestseller, and he did it.
So I guess we're all guilty, to an extent. This was difficult, more so than ghostwriting, because I had to find a different voice. And it was very interesting to see other's work in the act.
Have a great weekend guys.
My first plan was to find a paper that I previously wrote and touch it up by taking out a number of the citations, taking quotes out of passages, etc. However, I quickly found this to be impossible and unproductive. It was impossible because my voice and the voice of my quoted material were completely different. It would have been a dead giveaway.
Disgruntled, I decided to take a bunch of articles, and a passage from the book The World is Flat by Tom Friedman, and incorporate them into one. What was interesting about this was the effort it took to make my voice similar to theirs. My writing, because it largely citing statistics and making conclusions, was rather void of personality and flair. It blended it with theirs quite nicely. But it was harder to make my style fit theirs than if I would have written the paper on my own to begin with! Cheating should never make anything HARDER. :)
What I could have risked though, if I wrote it in my own voice, was unintentional plagiarism. Because I am not an expert on the topic, and because the research isn't my own, I would basically have to paraphrase any type of study I quoted. I don't know how much of that would equal plagiarism.
The other interesting aspect during my hunt for Courtney's work and vice versa was the plagiarism we found online. For example, Courtney took some of her work from MLB.com. However, when I found the material, it was at collegetickets.com, or something similar to that. It was a cheap knockoff of a website and they failed to quote MLB.com.
There was also specific phrase which Courtney googled from my paper, which led her an exact match in an National Science Board study. However, this exact sentence from the study also showed up word for word in Tom Friedman's book! Although it was one phrase, there was a hint of plagiarism, too. Now, perhaps it is hard to paraphrase the ENTIRE study, but he's a professional and a New York Times bestseller, and he did it.
So I guess we're all guilty, to an extent. This was difficult, more so than ghostwriting, because I had to find a different voice. And it was very interesting to see other's work in the act.
Have a great weekend guys.
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