Editor
Last spring Mark Allen asked those of us who’d been guests on That Word Chat to contribute door prizes for the annual Freelancers Happy Hour in conjunction with the ACES: The Society for Editing national conference.
My contributions were:
- an ebook copy of Midlife (there’s still time to get your hardcover before they’re gone forever!) and
- a bespoke four-panel cartoon.
The winner of the cartoon was Vee White, and when I contacted them to discuss ideas, they told me about an international plagiarism survey they and Andrea Klingler conducted on a sample of editors, writers, and publishers who work with English-language content.
They’re working on compiling the results, but attitudes toward plagiarism apparently span a spectrum from believing plagiarism is no big deal to, well, the (over)reaction you see here.
I once reviewed a conference paper in which I recognized some of the content. It had been copied from a paper that I wrote…
I’ve encountered situations where an author copies tech info from a competitor or third-party site, word for word, on the theory that this is the true and correct info, so we should use _that_. I guess I get the logic, but it don’t work that way.
I note in certain areas of fandom, there’s a predominant belief that if something exists on the internet, it is therefore immune to copyright and ownership.