Archive for 'Intellectual Property'

When I mention the blog to faculty at my university who are unfamiliar with the medium, the most common assumption is that it must be something like a chat room. It therefore usually takes a while to get people to take an initial look. Once they have taken a look, the most common reaction then becomes: aren’t you afraid that someone will plagiarise your work?

I don’t think I’m particularly naive on this issue, but I find the question very odd. I suppose there might be the standard collection of desperate students who plagiarise blog entries - the same ones who would plagiarise Wikipedia and other online resources. I understand that this is a concern for their teachers (although, at least with online content, teaching staff can catch it with a Google search), but not really why it’s a worry for me on a personal level.

I therefore assume the question must be: aren’t you afraid that another scholar will plagiarise your work, and publish it as their own?

In some kinds of work, I could certainly see that there might be a very strong concern: if I were part of a team, for example, competing with other teams to complete a particular scientific investigation, blogging my preliminary results might seem a bit unwise… But I blog here primarily about social theory and, occasionally, about Melbourne planning. Neither topic involves the kind of rush to competitive discovery that should yield lurkers poised to steal, say, our photos of steel kangaroos so that they can use the tip to rush off and duplicate such photos themselves…

I generally respond that publishing on the blog, which has an explicitly-stated policy outlining the conditions for use of materials posted here, actually establishes a verifiable date of publication for specific works - a date that could then be used if someone were to take some of the content and, say, publish it under their own name in a dissertation or, riskier still, a peer-reviewed publication. The protection I receive from publishing here is considerably greater, for example, than the protection I receive when I deliver annual talks as required by the research grant - and yet no one seems nervous that someone might seize on an otherwise unpublished paper from one of those discussions, and put it to nefarious uses. I realise the potential audience is smaller - but so is the ability to establish firmly what I said, and exactly when I said it…

My response never seems to reassure people who are nervous about the issue - and, as I said, perhaps I am just being naive on the issue… I realise that there is certainly the potential for someone to borrow a concept from the blog - something difficult to trace, because it isn’t tied to a particular mode of expression - and begin promoting themselves as the originator of some critical association, when academic etiquette would ordinarily require that they ackowledge the source of their ideas. Then again, this happens to concepts originally released to the world in quite respectable publications, as well - I’m not sure that blogging makes it more likely (and, again, the online nature of the content may make it easier to catch, if it does…).

More broadly, once we move into the territory of acknowledgements for basic concepts, I become a bit uncomfortable, for reasons that have nothing to do with blogging.

Some years back (and not at my present university), I watched from the sidelines as a dispute erupted between some students and a faculty member from whom these students had taken several classes. The students had jointly written a paper that was accepted for publication by a major journal. Happy with this publication success, they had forwarded a copy of their piece with compliments to the faculty member, who was referenced in the piece and whose influence on their work they readily acknowledged.

The faculty member, as it happened, was horrified to see concepts that had been discussed in class, but not in any written publications, mobilised within the students’ analysis. The students had applied these concepts (which, I have to admit, I thought could potentially have been derived from many sources even if, in practice, they had derived from a specific university course) to a subject matter unrelated to the faculty member’s research interests, had drawn their own original conclusions, and had, of course, conducted their own original research.

An ugly conflict ensued, with the faculty member notifying the journal that the work contained plagiarised content. The students were shocked, and then angry. The conflict was eventually resolved, but with relationships damaged on all sides. Other faculty, watching like I was from the sidelines, were dismayed that an instructor would so claim to “own” concepts discussed in the classroom, and felt that part of the point of placing one’s work in the public sphere - whether through publication or through teaching - was to release concepts and ideas so that others could innovate around and through them…

I suppose I view the conceptual elements of the blog in a similar way: if someone owes a deep and specific debt to a particular theoretical or empirical exposition, by all means they should acknowledge that debt. If someone owes a small and superficial debt, it’s certainly polite to ackowledge this in some way, as well. But if a concept resonates so strongly that it becomes integral to someone’s own conceptual framework, chances are this owes as much to the time and to the context, as it does to the source where someone contingently encountered a concept for the first time. There are limits to intellectual debts - limits related to how broadly we all owe our conceptual frameworks to borrowed notions whose sources we half-remember…

At any rate, I’m not sure whether this is what worries the people who advise that I shouldn’t blog, from fear that people may plagiarise my work: perhaps the concern is more narrowly focussed on stolen phrases, which is, I think, an “easier” issue… But, since I do routinely use this blog as a conceptual scratchpad, I am curious what others think on the broader issue: is it the general practice of academics to try to maintain “trade secrets” about their work until a peer-reviewed publication is in hand? If not, then, does blogging substantially increase the risk that someone else will illicitly appropriate academic work?