 | Price Comparisons: Rental | | Sorry, the textbook you were looking for is not available as Rental, at any of the stores we searched. | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | A concise, lively, and bracing exploration of an issue bedeviling our cultural landscape–plagiarism in literature, academia, music, art, and film–by one of our most influential and controversial legal scholars. Best-selling novelists J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown, popular historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose, Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree, first novelist Kaavya Viswanathan: all have rightly or wrongly been accused of plagiarism–theft of intellectual property–provoking widespread media punditry. But what exactly is plagiarism? How has the meaning of this notoriously ambiguous term changed over time as a consequence of historical and cultural transformations? Is the practice on the rise, or just more easily detectable by technological advances? How does the current market for expressive goods inform our own understanding of plagiarism? Is there really such a thing as “cryptomnesia,” the unconscious, unintentional appropriation of another’s work? What are the mysterious motives and curious excuses of plagiarists? What forms of punishment and absolution does this “sin” elicit? What is the good in certain types of plagiarism?
Provocative, insightful, and extraordinary for its clarity and forthrightness, The Little Book of Plagiarism is an analytical tour de force in small, the work of “one of the top twenty legal thinkers in America” (Legal Affairs), a distinguished jurist renowned for his adventuresome intellect and daring iconoclasm. |
Average Customer Rating:   A Detailed, Intellectual Viewpoint! Best-selling novelists and historians have been accused of plagiarism. It's regularly committed by celebrities, though mostly by students. Judge Posner's detailed review of the topic makes readers quickly realize that there is much more to this topic than probably first meets the eye.
Judicial opinions, textbook writing, celebrity ghostwritten accounts, laboratory heads appending their names on all papers written - all involve some degree of plagiarism, though in most cases it is expected and not really seen as such. Even Shakespeare is accused of plagiarism, though in his day it was not seen as such if the work improved on an original. Classical musicians plagiarize folk melodies.
Posner does not believe it should be treated as a crime or tort - those accused rarely have sufficient assets to make suing them worthwhile. Curiously, most litigation over this issue is initiated by students disciplined for committing it.
Finally, Posner also points out that digitization makes detection more likely - the software "Turnitin" (costs 80 cents/enrolled student) uses large-scale, updated databases that include journal articles and periodicals, as well as all student papers submitted previously. Clear, Concise, and Informative: A Pleasure to read This is my first time reading Posner, who is very prolific, and I was very pleased. He is able to be very analytic while still remaining very readable (I read the book in probably two hours). He uses a lot of examples both current and from history (Shakespeare etc.) to examine the subject of plagiarism. I would recommend this book for anyone that creates things or produces something.
The topic of originality was especially interesting. What is original and who is truly original? The book got me to think about how much writers, poets, musicians, etc. borrow.
I would also recommend this book for teachers and professors who regularly have to deal with the problem of plagiarism. "Every artist is a cannibal and every poet is a thief...." Short and dull. Judge Posner is known for being prolific - reading the dust-jacket blurb, one's immediate question is "how can one man write so many books?" If this book is anything to go by, the answer is "by having them be short, dull, and perfunctory".
The operative word in the title is "little" - at 106 pages and a reduced page size (I would guess 60% of normal), it's little more than an expanded magazine article. There was nothing particularly illuminating in the book - the style was (predictably) stolid, with awkward sentences like the following being far too frequent:
There is considerable overlap between plagiarism and copyright infringement, but not all plagiarism is copyright infringement and not all copyright infringement is plagiarism.
The great majority of the material in this book was a dull restatement of the obvious. Even the examples were dull - quite an accomplishment, given that the history of plagiarism is not exactly wanting for colorful characters. The only thing I learned from this book was Judge Posner's view that the difficulty of detection of an offence should play a greater role than the seriousness of damage done in determining the severity of punishment, That, and the fact that he is not a fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin.
If you want to read a well-written and interesting book about plagiarism, give this one a miss and try instead Thomas Mallon's excellent "Stolen Words". A Useful Discussion on a Sometimes Confusing Topic Richard Posner is a Chicago-based judge on the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals and has been occasionally cited as US Supreme Court material. He is also a prolific author mostly on matters adjacent to the law. How does a judge in an overworked court system have time to write so much extra-curricularly? You'll find the answer in the book.
Why is he (or anybody else) writing this particular book? He writes on page 9, "What makes plagiarism a fascinating subject and the occasion for this book is the ambiguity of the concept, its complex relations to other disapproved practices of copying, including copyright infringement, the variety of its applications, its historical and cultural relativity, its contested normative significance, the mysterious motives and curious excuses of its practitioners, the means of detection, and the forms of punishment and absolution." Not to worry -- the rest of the book reads more easily that this concise summary.
To be sure, the word "little" in the title is physically accurate; the book is small, the type large, the line-spacing generous, and it weighs in at just over 100 pages. It seems a narrow subject. But it will interest anybody with a broad interest in intellectual property, and should be read by anybody confused about how to deal with the subject. Plagiarism is not a legal concept, and Posner does not argue that it should be, but he looks at it from joint points of view as a judge and a professor. The book teases out the complex interrelationships among plagiarism, "self-plagiarism", copyright infringement, fair use, trademark infringement, works for hire, ghostwriting, paper mills, originality, creativity, fabrication, ideas versus their expression, attribution, book packaging, and managed books. This is its chief and considerable virtue.
So what exactly is plagiarism? He sums up on page 106: "Plagiarism is a species of intellectual fraud. It consists of unauthorized copying that the copier claims (whether explicitly or implicitly, and whether deliberately or carelessly) is original with him and the claim causes the copier's audience to behave otherwise than it would if it knew the truth." This is a fine summary, and written in a judicial style, presumably not by a law clerk. However, to understand the many nuances in this definition, it will be necessary to read the book.
The Little Book of Plagiarism The Little Book of Plagiarism
The author of this book is a judge who is an expert on the subjects of plagiarism and copyright infringement. He makes clear the distiction of these two terms and the penalties that will rain down on you for committing each of these acts. Plagiarism brings shame to one wo steals ideas, without acknowleging his/her sources; but infringing the legal rights of copyright owners can call forth financial contributions from you pocket. The author cities and analyzes a few court cases, to clarify your thinking on these subjects. |  |
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