Unintentional Plagiarism

Opinionet ^ | 4/3/02 | W. James Antle III

[dubyajames]

W. James Antle III

Unintentional Plagiarism

Plagiarism has been in the news an awful lot lately. It seems that a lot of well-regarded people have developed a knack for writing things that sound remarkably like things that have already been published. No, we're not talking about Mike Barnicle here. Eminent (or at least popular) historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin have seen phrases in their most recent books compared to previously published works. This is especially interesting given the controversy over Joseph McGinnis' 1993 book The Last Brother involving material borrowed from Goodwin's The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (1987). Let me borrow, with citation of course, her reaction to this at the time from The Boston Globe: "He just uses it flat out, without saying that it came from my work."

Strong similarities were noticed between Stephen Ambrose's latest book, The Wild Blue, and Thomas Childers' Wings of Morning. Taking a break from promoting national greatness and the presidential aspirations of John McCain, The Weekly Standard published an article comparing the two books by Fred Barnes. Shortly thereafter, The Standard received a letter pointing out similarities between Goodwin's The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys and other works.

In a piece for the January 28 issue published on the neocon magazine's website, Bo Crader explored the similarities between Goodwin's book and books about the Kennedys by Hank Searls (1969's The Lost Prince: Young Joe, the Forgotten Kennedy) and Lynne McTaggart (1983's Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times), and even Rose Kennedy's own 1974 autobiography Times to Remember. Things have gotten so bad that she withdrew as a judge for the Pulitzer Prize.

For Ambrose's part, the number of his books being scrutinized is now up to five, with the latest allegations concerning similarities between Nothing Like It In The World (1999) and David Lavender's The Great Persuader, as reported on Forbes.com.

My point here isn't to borrow from other writers' investigative work and rehash the sentence-by-sentence comparisons made between all these books. Much more interesting is the fact that most of the similarities were written off as an accident. Simon & Schuster, for example, has explained that the similarities discovered in Ambrose's books are attributable to "methodology, not wrongdoing" and even Barnes noted that it was likely unintentional, given how prolific a writer he is.

When George Harrison died in December, it was recalled that the writers of the Chiffons' hit "He's So Fine" had sued him for copying their work with his 1970 hit "My Sweet Lord," from the excellent All Things Must Pass. In 1976, a court ruled that Harrison had "unintentionally" plagiarized the song, which when you listen to it does sound remarkably like "He's So Fine."

Is unintentional plagiarism possible? It is easy to imagine a songwriter composing a new melody or lyric with another song in his head, with a hook that sounds fresh that actually turns out to have appeared in another song. If you have listened to a lot of music, it is easy to confuse songs and maybe it is even easy to confuse somebody else's work for an original thought. I know, I used to write poetry (not professionally, as the poetry itself attests, but as an amateurish vessel of teen-aged angst) with songs in my head. Perhaps if my old poems are ever set to music, James Taylor will sue me.

It is a little harder to explain in terms of writing, but I can still see how it can be done. Most written work is based on researching other people's work, unless you go around plotting econometric graphs or conducting sociological studies yourself. Remember the hot water Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby got himself into with an innocuous column that talked about the fate of several signers of the Declaration of Independence. If a historic event like that hasn't been written about before, it would have to be made up now. Yet the lack of originality of this material was treated almost as if the history had been copyrighted.

If you read a lot, it is also easy to grope for a catchy phrase or some original wording and end up pulling something that sounds good to you from the recesses of your memory that you read somewhere and consciously forgot about. In January 2001, I wrote an article defending John Ashcroft from left-liberal criticism (yes, that was definitely before the PATRIOT Act) that appeared in Enter Stage Right. My piece opened with the phrase, "Contrary to the weeping and gnashing of teeth emanating from the chattering class…" An ESR editorial from the previous month began with a remarkably similar phrase.

Unintentional plagiarism? The subjects of the two articles were completely different, the context was somewhat different and there was a difference of a word here and there in that phrase alone. Neither "gnashing of teeth" nor "chattering class" are copyrighted. At least my editor, Steven Martinovich, hasn't thrown me off the masthead yet. But is it possible that when searching for a phrase to use describing the hysterical reaction to President Bush's choice of Ashcroft to head the Justice Department, I reached into my subconscious and pulled out something from that editorial? Certainly.

Other than how quickly the offender owns up to the similarities between their work and others' when pointed out, I don't have any sure-fire test of what makes plagiarism intentional versus unintentional. But that doesn't mean unintentional plagiarism doesn't exist.

In the meantime, term paper writers everywhere have found a convenient new defense for borrowing without attribution from their sources. Even Beatles and historians make mistakes, why not lesser human beings?