Admitted Theft: Malcom Gladwell and Plagiarism
In something borrowed, Malcolm Gladwell presents a copyright infringement case that changed how he viewed plagiarism. A playwright, Bryony Lavery, used an article he wrote for a play of hers, “Frozen.” The article in question was about Dorothy Lewis, a psychiatrist who specialized in serial killers, and she was the one who was primarily upset. Gladwell too was upset initially, but the situation made him question the ideas we have about plagiarism. He finds the many problems with these ideas: that plagiarism is less okay in writing than other mediums, that it’s outright stealing – implying that the original owner no longer has it – that all ideas should be completely original and not derived from something, and how disconnected all the standards of copyright are from eh creative process. After his criticism Gladwell recognizes that the sentences Lavery
…show more content…
Obviously there will be different standards between architecture and poetry, but even within smaller groups of mediums there are huge inconsistencies. Lavery credited one source of information that she had also used for Frozen, but not credited Gladwell or Lewis because she considered it “news.” News media is a good example of how contrived and arbitrary copyright rules are. Gladwell recalls how, when he worked for a newspaper, he was, “routinely dispatched to ‘match’ a story from the Times: to do a new version of someone else’s idea.” News sources often use each other as sources with no credit, but because they carefully reword what was already said. So it’s okay to steal someone’s thesis as long as you don’t use any of their words, according to ownership laws. It makes sense that the laws are this way, because ideas are hard to track, whereas phrases can be found directly. Creating copyright legislation is more futile and agitating than productive in preventing