Seems to me I’ve read those words before
4th May 2006 by Nick Durutta, ABC
The other day I was reading a home improvement magazine and was caught by an article’s opening phrase that began, ‘Let’s be blunt.’ I liked it, and made a mental note to try it out in an article I was writing at work.
Now I’m wondering if I was just being creatively lazy. Two recent incidents made me question when lifting a few words from another writer’s work crosses the line into bald-faced plagiarism.
We’ve all heard the recent story about how 19-year-old Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan ‘borrowed’ numerous passages verbatim from another author’s work for her highly-touted debut novel. She seems like a bright kid, but apparently not bright enough to realize that if you’re going to steal, don’t steal from a successful, best-selling author.
Now comes news that William Swanson, chairman and CEO of Raytheon Corp., lifted some content for his “Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management” booklet that was distributed free to 250,000 people inside and outside the company. (Turns out some of these unwritten rules had been written before, in a 1944 book, “The Unwritten laws of Engineering.”) Poor Kaavya lost a $500,000 book deal, but Swanson will lose much more — approximately $1 miliion in salary increase and incentive-stock compensation that the Raytheon board revoked when they heard of his indiscretion. He must be wondering how they got their hands on a copy of “The Unwritten Laws of Engineering.”
Is it ever okay to use any of another writer’s work — even if it’s in an obscure 1944 engineering book? And not just is it likely you’ll never be found out. Is it ever ethical?
May 4th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
Nick,
You always will be safe if you attribute someone else’s work to the original author. Altering someone’s original work to try to get around copyight and intellectual property rights is dangerous. Give credit where credit is due. In the case of the 1944 book, if Swanson couldn’t obtain permission to quote the rules, he should have tried to summarize or restate them. For example, we can find many instances of people who offer their versions of topics such as “10 Common Writing Errors,” and many are nearly identical. But they are written slightly differently. Just takes a little effort.
May 6th, 2006 at 9:43 pm
[...] It’s always fun to see what Malcolm Gladwell is talking about on his blog. It’s even more fun when he admits he was off base and his readers were right. And Nick Durutta at the IABC Communications Commons weighs in with a similar story. [...]
May 8th, 2006 at 10:31 am
Yes Tom, you are totally right, it is very dangerous, and the level of danger depends also on the law on copy rights of the country where you are publishing. Sometimes it looks harmless and inocent to use small quotes even in internal publications, but it can be easily traced and you can get into trouble. In Mexico, for example, we should mention always the source and rewrite it literally. In that case, permission is not necessary, but if you dare to publish it even in a different wording without mentioning the author, you have to face the law with big charges.