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Clear, Concise, and Informative: A Pleasure to read

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This is my first time reading Posner, who is very prolific, and I was very pleased. He is able to be very analytic while still remaining very readable (I read the book in probably two hours). He uses a lot of examples both current and from history (Shakespeare etc.) to examine the subject of plagiarism. I would recommend this book for anyone that creates things or produces something.

The topic of originality was especially interesting. What is original and who is truly original? The book got me to think about how much writers, poets, musicians, etc. borrow.

I would also recommend this book for teachers and professors who regularly have to deal with the problem of plagiarism. "Every artist is a cannibal and every poet is a thief...."

Short and dull.

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Judge Posner is known for being prolific - reading the dust-jacket blurb, one's immediate question is "how can one man write so many books?" If this book is anything to go by, the answer is "by having them be short, dull, and perfunctory".

The operative word in the title is "little" - at 106 pages and a reduced page size (I would guess 60% of normal), it's little more than an expanded magazine article. There was nothing particularly illuminating in the book - the style was (predictably) stolid, with awkward sentences like the following being far too frequent:

There is considerable overlap between plagiarism and copyright infringement, but not all plagiarism is copyright infringement and not all copyright infringement is plagiarism.

The great majority of the material in this book was a dull restatement of the obvious. Even the examples were dull - quite an accomplishment, given that the history of plagiarism is not exactly wanting for colorful characters. The only thing I learned from this book was Judge Posner's view that the difficulty of detection of an offence should play a greater role than the seriousness of damage done in determining the severity of punishment, That, and the fact that he is not a fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin.

If you want to read a well-written and interesting book about plagiarism, give this one a miss and try instead Thomas Mallon's excellent "Stolen Words".

A Useful Discussion on a Sometimes Confusing Topic

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Richard Posner is a Chicago-based judge on the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals and has been occasionally cited as US Supreme Court material. He is also a prolific author mostly on matters adjacent to the law. How does a judge in an overworked court system have time to write so much extra-curricularly? You'll find the answer in the book.

Why is he (or anybody else) writing this particular book? He writes on page 9, "What makes plagiarism a fascinating subject and the occasion for this book is the ambiguity of the concept, its complex relations to other disapproved practices of copying, including copyright infringement, the variety of its applications, its historical and cultural relativity, its contested normative significance, the mysterious motives and curious excuses of its practitioners, the means of detection, and the forms of punishment and absolution." Not to worry -- the rest of the book reads more easily that this concise summary.

To be sure, the word "little" in the title is physically accurate; the book is small, the type large, the line-spacing generous, and it weighs in at just over 100 pages. It seems a narrow subject. But it will interest anybody with a broad interest in intellectual property, and should be read by anybody confused about how to deal with the subject. Plagiarism is not a legal concept, and Posner does not argue that it should be, but he looks at it from joint points of view as a judge and a professor. The book teases out the complex interrelationships among plagiarism, "self-plagiarism", copyright infringement, fair use, trademark infringement, works for hire, ghostwriting, paper mills, originality, creativity, fabrication, ideas versus their expression, attribution, book packaging, and managed books. This is its chief and considerable virtue.

So what exactly is plagiarism? He sums up on page 106: "Plagiarism is a species of intellectual fraud. It consists of unauthorized copying that the copier claims (whether explicitly or implicitly, and whether deliberately or carelessly) is original with him and the claim causes the copier's audience to behave otherwise than it would if it knew the truth." This is a fine summary, and written in a judicial style, presumably not by a law clerk. However, to understand the many nuances in this definition, it will be necessary to read the book.

The Little Book of Plagiarism

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The Little Book of Plagiarism

The author of this book is a judge who is an expert on the subjects of plagiarism and copyright infringement. He makes clear the distiction of these two terms and the penalties that will rain down on you for committing each of these acts. Plagiarism brings shame to one wo steals ideas, without acknowleging his/her sources; but infringing the legal rights of copyright owners can call forth financial contributions from you pocket. The author cities and analyzes a few court cases, to clarify your thinking on these subjects.

Big Subject, Small and Accessible Book

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Plagiarism is not a legal offense in itself. Thus, you might think that Judge Richard Posner might not be the best of guides to it, even though he has written books about non-legal issues before. But plagiarism does sometimes include fraud, copyright infringement, theft, and unfair competition, issues that are clearly legal in nature. In _The Little Book of Plagiarism_ (Pantheon), Posner has turned a legal view onto the very gray areas of plagiarism, an offense that everyone thinks is bad, but which comes in many forms, each with variants that are not offenses at all. Plagiarism has been in the news a lot lately, with famous (or potentially famous) people damaged by the charge. In the digital age, plagiarism is easier, and so Posner has written a useful volume to guide logical thinking on a hot issue. It is indeed a little book, 109 pages of text, but there are plenty of big ideas here, expressed in pithy prose that calls out for re-reading just to appreciate its clarity and lack of superfluity.

People weren't always so picky. One of Posner's examples is that of Shakespeare's use of Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's description of Cleopatra's barge, which shows up in blank-verse paraphrase in _Antony and Cleopatra_. Posner includes both passages here, and it clear that Shakespeare really did borrow North, and also clear that Shakespeare's description is more colorful and fun to read. ("If this is plagiarism," jokes Posner, "we need more plagiarism.") If Shakespeare were writing today, he'd probably be in trouble for all his borrowed plots and characters. Plagiarism changes depending upon time, locale, and profession. So, how do we know when something is plagiarism and when it isn't? Posner suggests, among other things, that we evaluate the harm done. An example Posner returns to repeatedly is that of Kaavya Viswanathan whose novel _How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life_ came out in April 2006. She was a sophomore at Harvard University (Posner gives many examples from Harvard here, and maintains that plagiarism is no more common in that estimable school, just more conspicuous, and more enjoyed by the public when revealed). She got a half million dollar advance for her work and a film deal with DreamWorks. Attentive readers, however, found that there were passages that had been lifted from the work of a fellow "chick-lit" author Megan McCafferty. Viswanathan didn't do her readers any real harm; her book is as good as they found it. She didn't harm her publisher (until she was caught), and she herself brought any harmful consequences to herself. The harm is done to McCafferty, and not simply because McCafferty's words were lifted and re-used, but because by doing so, Viswanathan boosted herself up as a competitor within the chick-lit field, an unfair advantage.

So a key for finding plagiarism is finding that harm has been done, but Posner does not wish to see it among the harms dealt with by the criminal courts: "The harms it causes are too slight to warrant cranking up the costly and clumsy machinery of the criminal law", and often the harm is insufficient to crank up the civil courts, either. Viswanathan got her measure of "... disgrace, humiliation, ostracism, and other shaming penalties imposed by public opinion on people who violate social norms whether or not they are also legal norms." So did Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, and Alan Dershowitz, whose cases are examined here. That high-profile authors would risk getting caught in such thefts is something that Posner cannot explain, but he does make the case that the digital technology which makes plagiarism particularly easy these days is also going to make it more detectable. There are programs on the market like Turnitin which are doing better sleuthing for plagiarism than any professor or general reader. Thousands of colleges license the program; Harvard doesn't, and Posner accuses it of being naïve. Turnitin looks for similar passages in previous works, especially those on the web (and remember that many quotations from modern books are found on the web, even if full books are not). The program also looks for similarities within papers that have been submitted to it for inspection before. Publishers aren't themselves using such programs much yet, because they would simply rather not know beforehand, but Little, Brown lost plenty on the Viswanathan affair. Posner says, "We may be entering the twilight of plagiarism." It is a rewarding intellectual amusement to share Posner's thinking about the subject, which presents plagiarism with penetrating originality.