Saturday, March 24, 2007
Fresh Comment.1
Lawrence Ebert is onboard with a comment on the correction below and is a little puzzled. We have posted an comment/explanation that should clarify the matter. John Simpson has a comment on the "CHA Example" item. An anonymous comment has been posted on the "Plagiarism, prayer" item.
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The point about priority brings up issues in the current patent reform movement.
ReplyDeleteIn the heady days of the dot.com revolution, some people were not writing down what they were doing, and some were. Some of the latter have been suing some of the former over patent infringement, and now we have the "coalition for patent fairness." There are lots of people who don't believe in priority, even in the patent context.
Separately, I have been interested by the disregard of priority by certain historians. A recent book on the prison at Andersonville published by the University of Tennessee Press contained significant material plagiarized from an earlier book. The "theft" was discovered only when the earlier author was given the later book to review. A different book, on Custer at Gettysburg published by Putnam, portrayed as "novel" a theory that had been published many times before. In the current Cha matter, JeongHwan Kim found out about the plagiarism from a third party.
In the end, many customers of information care more about how the information is packaged than about who was the first to identify the information. The Harvard Business Review in 2004 had an article with a sub-heading "Plagiarize with Pride."