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What Is Plagiarism?
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Shia LaBoeuf’s response to his plagiarism scandal was very theatrical. In February 2014, he wore a paper bag over his head declaring that he was no longer famous.
cinemafestival/Shutterstock.com
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In December 2013, actor Shia LaBeouf, released a short film he had directed called HowardCantour.com online. The film was about a fictional film critic named Howard Cantour, and had previously premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012. At that time, the film received critical acclaim. As soon as it made its online premiere, however, people began to notice something fishy. The film followed a very similar plot to a graphic novel written by Daniel Clowes. But Clowes’ name didn’t appear credited anywhere in the film. In fact, it soon came to light that Clowes wasn’t aware a film had been made of one of his works. He told BuzzFeed in 2013 it was only brought to his attention after he was forwarded a link.
The backlash was immediate. LaBeouf pulled the film down from the Internet. He also argued that he had not intended to copy Clowes’ work but instead was merely inspired by it. He apologized to Clowes in a series of tweets through Twitter. Many didn’t think his apologies were serious. In fact, many of his apology tweets were also plagiarized; they were copies of apology tweets from other celebrities including Kayne West, Tiger Woods, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Copying and Copyright
Just what had LaBeouf done that was so bad that so many people demanded answers from the celebrity? In short, by not offering credit to the creator of the original story, he had plagiarized. He had taken the work of other people and claimed it as his own.
Shia LaBeouf is not the only celebrity to face such allegations. In 2021, Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, Jay-Z, Drake, Chris Brown, and a number of other celebrities were accused of stealing other people’s works. Throughout history, plenty of famous people have been accused of plagiarism. They include the great novelist Vladimir Nabokov, the esteemed historian Stephen Ambrose, and Russian president Vladimir Putin. Even civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr. has been called a plagiarist.
In some of those cases, the people who supposedly plagiarized stole someone else’s words. But other creative works can be plagiarized, too. For instance, plagiarists often try to pass off another person’s artwork, music, or data as their own. Even ideas can be plagiarized.
Is it always illegal to copy from a copyrighted work? In a word, no. Anyone can reproduce a small portion of a copyrighted work under what is called fair use. Figuring out exactly what is fair use is very tricky, though. In general, fair use allows you to quote a little bit of a long work. For instance, one sentence quoted out of a five-hundred-page book is likely going to fall under fair use. Short works, like song lyrics, are another matter, however. Say a song has twenty lines of lyrics. If someone publishes ten lines in a book without permission, that person can be accused of copyright infringement.
Works that were once under copyright can also lose their protection. They are then in the public domain. If a work is in the public domain, anyone anywhere can do with it whatever he or she wants. But keep in mind that even if something is in the public domain, if you copy from it, you are still plagiarizing. For instance, let’s say you’re taking a creative writing course, and you turn in a few chapters from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as your own work. The novel is in the public domain, so you haven’t broken any laws. But your teacher won’t appreciate what you’ve done. They will still say that you plagiarized and probably will give you an F for your efforts.
Types of Plagiarizing
Like that latter example, some types of plagiarism are very easy to recognize. Think of a student who buys a research paper about Emily Dickinson’s poetry and turns it in to their American literature teacher with their name on it. Or think of a photographer who pads their portfolio with photographs taken by their best friend and hopes their art teacher can’t tell. But sometimes just what constitutes plagiarism isn’t so clear-cut. It is in those instances that otherwise honest students are most likely to get themselves into trouble.
Cut and Paste Plagiarism
OK, you want to start over. This time, you’ll rewrite the article, reworking each and every sentence. What you’re trying to do is paraphrase—putting another person’s ideas in your own words. But if you stick to the original article’s structure, laboriously rewriting each sentence and paragraph, you are still plagiarizing. Essentially, you’ve just reproduced the ideas and structure of the article, without adding any of your own ideas to the mix.
Failure to Cite
Another kind of plagiarism is the result of sloppy note-taking practices. Say you found some information online and just copied and pasted it into a document you were using to write down ideas and record the research you’d found. In your haste you forgot to cite the source in your notes, so the information is just mixed in with your own thoughts and words. A week later, when you are using your notes to write your paper, you thought that the words you copied and pasted were your own, so pasted them into your paper without any citation. This type of plagiarism may be either unconscious or accidental, but it’s still plagiarism, and if your teacher discovers it, you may not get the benefit of the doubt that you plagiarized by accident.
AI Plagiarism
In November 2022, the artificial intelligence (AI) software ChatGPT was introduced, causing a stir among students and educators alike. In early 2023, the New York City Department of Education even prohibited public schools from accessing it. ChatGPT is like other chatbots that have question-and-answer sessions with users, but ChatGPT is much more powerful. It scours Internet sources like Reddit and Wikipedia to generate complex answers that closely mimic real human language. ChatGPT can write computer code, song lyrics, student papers, even whole dissertations. However, it often produces flat or clunky sentences, doesn’t differentiate between minor points and major ones, and can reproduce inaccurate information. (As the saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out.”) This means it could take more work to verify the accuracy of ChatGPT results and clarify its awkward sentences than it could take you to do the research and writing yourself. Software also exists that can catch ChatGPT-generated writing and many schools are using it to check student work for plagiarism. As always, if there’s something online that can help you cheat, there’s also something online that can catch you cheating.
With all that in mind, you’re ready to take another shot. This time, you are more careful in your paraphrasing, you rework the structure of the article, and you insert some original ideas into your paper. Even with all that work, you still may be accused of plagiarism. In most assignments, especially in research papers, you are expected to make it clear what ideas are your own and what ideas are someone else’s. Remember that plagiarism is not just stealing someone’s words. It is also stealing their ideas. If you use another person’s ideas, you have to make that clear in your text with citations, and you have to provide information about where the reader can find those sources with a bibliography.
So now you know something about what plagiarizing is. A cut-and-paste job with a few word changes is plagiarism. A clumsy paraphrase that adds nothing new is plagiarism. A mixture of your ideas and others’ ideas without properly noting which is plagiarism. You probably also realize that avoiding plagiarism is harder than you may have thought. But that leaves another important question still unanswered: why should you care about plagiarism in the first place?