The following is our CCCC panel: myself, Rebecca Moore Howard, and Sandra Jamieson. Becky did a great job putting this together, so a public thank you is in order.
Session Description:
Contemporary life in the U.S. is awash in the discourse of transgressive textuality. Concerns about text owners' ability to profit from their property led to the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998, which extends copyright protection seventy years past the author's death. Many professional organizations include the subject of plagiarism in their statements on professional ethics; most colleges have established policies regarding plagiarism; and the Council of Writing Program Administrators has issued a Best Practices document addressed to college teachers, students, and administrators.
None of these addresses questions of plagiarism in weblogs and wikis. As Siva Vaidhyanathan has observed, plagiarism is a local rather than legal issue; it is adjudicated through institutional practices and policies. When one blogger plagiarizes from another—whether that plagiarism is unattributed quotation or wholesale appropriation of entire texts—there are no regulations to remediate the situation. Copyright infringement has occurred only if the appropriation deprives the originating blogger of income, which is seldom the case. When no colleges or professional organizations are involved, the appropriation falls under no one's plagiarism policies. This panel explores how web users define and deal with plagiarism in the absence of official policy and procedure; the implications of their definitions and responses; and the larger authorship issues raised by the Internet.
SPEAKER 1, "Negotiating and Regulating Plagiarism in Everyday Blogging Practices"
"You hv posted a very kewl blog. I have stolen a few things from It just to start with my own blog." This message, a curious kind of indirect citation, was sent to Speaker 1. The sender, who wishes to start a weblog and wants some startup material for it, copies and posts material from Speaker 1's weblog. However, s/he notifies the author shortly afterwards, along with a compliment and an expression of thanks. Speaker 1 discusses both this illustrative case and an argument about improper citation of material on the popular group weblog Kuro5hin*. In a comment thread at Kuro5hin, one poster publicly called out another for plagiarizing material from Wikipedia, and another poster made the argument that Kuro5hin "isn't exactly a formal publication." This is a moment in which notions of intellectual property and plagiarism are staunchly disagreed upon, and these cases demonstrate the complexity and variety of views of these concepts. Speaker 1 argues that these cases reveal a segment of the cultural milieu regarding the concept of plagiarism and that further exploration of plagiarism in nonacademic, everyday public discourse can enrich the existing body of classroom research about intellectual property, authorship, and plagiarism.