Last Straw

At the begin­ning of Feb­ru­ary, when I arrived back in Lon­don from a trip to New Zea­l­and, I was sur­prised to find my inbox full of mes­sages alert­ing me that a per­son named Ty McDon­ald had been fired from a news­pa­per for pla­gi­ar­ising me.

The work allegedly pla­gi­ar­ised? An art­icle I pub­lished in 2006, titled, Pla­gi­ar­ism and intel­lec­tual loot. It’s a piece that rejects the idea of “intel­lec­tual prop­erty,” arguing instead that in a soci­ety organ­ised with human hap­pi­ness as an object­ive, copy­right infringe­ment laws and sim­ilar restric­tions would not hinder the dis­tri­bu­tion and recom­bin­a­tion of ideas.

It’s inter­est­ing — and amus­ing in some respects — to get fired for pla­gi­ar­ising a piece cham­pi­on­ing pla­gi­ar­ism, but it gets bet­ter. I pla­gi­ar­ised the whole piece myself, nearly word for word. McDon­ald didn’t pla­gi­ar­ise me. He pla­gi­ar­ised from the same book I did: Days of War, Nights of Love, pub­lished in 2000 by Cri­methInc. ex-Workers’ Col­lect­ive, a book that actu­ally encour­ages oth­ers to pla­gi­ar­ise from it.¹

So, based on alleg­a­tions by a fac­ulty mem­ber at Texas Tech Uni­ver­sity, who had obvi­ously come across my web­site, the edit­or­ial board of The Daily Tor­eador promptly fired McDon­ald, pub­licly accus­ing him of pla­gi­ar­ising me and of “com­prom­ising the integ­rity of the paper and the aca­demic insti­tu­tion it serves.”

A reporter is said to under­mine a newspaper’s cred­ib­il­ity in fail­ing to hon­estly acknow­ledge sources, but, how­ever pre­dict­able, pub­licly chas­tising and fir­ing a volun­teer writer from a stu­dent news­pa­per for pla­gi­ar­ising an opin­ion piece cham­pi­on­ing pla­gi­ar­ism seems a little tact­less to me. Clearly there’s a little more to the story.

Not only was McDonald’s pub­lic fir­ing tact­less but it was also based on incor­rect inform­a­tion. Neither The Daily Toreador’s Editor, Michelle Casady, nor any­body else, ever got in touch with me before mak­ing the decision to fire McDon­ald and pub­licly humi­li­ate him by fail­ing to explain the full story. The pub­lic state­ment that McDon­ald pla­gi­ar­ised me is simply incor­rect. Fur­ther­more, not only has the edit­or­ial board mis­lead their read­ers to the full extent of this story but they’ve sub­sequently denied McDon­ald the chance to explain his side of the story to their readers.

By incor­rectly accus­ing McDon­ald of pla­gi­ar­ising me and by accus­ing McDon­ald of com­prom­ising the integ­rity of the paper without rejoin­der, I think the edit­or­ial board does a dis­ser­vice to both McDon­ald and their read­ers. At the very least they should retract the accus­a­tion that McDon­ald pla­gi­ar­ised me and offer McDon­ald the chance to give their read­ers a more nuanced side to the story.

They even went to the length of arguing that pla­gi­ar­ism is a “ser­i­ous offense in any forum” and “a very ser­i­ous prob­lem within our soci­ety” and “in no way, shape or form should … ever be tol­er­ated.” Not even, it seems, when you’re mak­ing a point about pla­gi­ar­ism itself.

Copy­right and pla­gi­ar­ism are ideas that deserve full and frank dis­cus­sion in our soci­et­ies and a view as blinkered as the one above does noth­ing to fur­ther an adult dis­cus­sion on the topic.

External links:

• DT colum­nist fired for pla­gi­ar­ism | 5 Feb­ru­ary, 2008
• Fired for Pla­gi­ar­iz­ing Pla­gi­ar­ism | 12 Feb­ru­ary, 2008
• Days of War, Nights of Love on CrimthInc.
• Days of War, Nights of Love on Wikipedia

1. Days of War, Nights of Love copyleft state­ment: Eng­lish lan­guage (and all applic­a­tions thereof) used without per­mis­sion from its invent­ors, writers, and copy­writers. No rights reserved. All parts of this book may be repro­duced and trans­mit­ted in any form by any means, elec­tronic or mech­an­ical, espe­cially includ­ing pho­to­copy­ing if it is done at the expense of some unsus­pect­ing cor­por­a­tion. Other recom­men­ded meth­ods include broad­cast­ing read­ing over pir­ate radio, reprint­ing tracts in unwary news­pa­pers, and just sign­ing your own name to this and pub­lish­ing it as your own work. Any claim relat­ing to copy­right infringe­ment, advoc­a­tion of illegal activ­it­ies, defam­a­tion of char­ac­ter, incite­ment to riot, treason, etc. should be addressed dir­ectly to your Con­gressper­son as a mil­it­ary rather than civil issue. —Days of War, Nights of Love, page 4 [↩]