A plague of plagiarism

LAYING ITSELF open to thievery being so temptingly and readily accessible, the Internet must have by now fostered a plague of plagiarism. If not enough cases have come to light to support any claim to such a scale, I imagine it’s only because little watching, let alone policing, is done. Plagiarism is, after all, a naturally self-interested concern, the concern chiefly of the possessor stolen from.

Students are the most known for stealing from the Net, for theses and term papers, and getting away with it; teachers are simply unable to keep track. But teachers, I suppose, have other ways—they had better—of evaluating the worth of their students and their work.

At any rate, among the plagiarists deserving most to be exposed and made accountable are those who, by the very nature of their vocations, give the impression, deliberately or incidentally, of Caesarian rectitude and nobility—in particular, officials, writers, and other public performers: they who dare speak their thoughts or set them down.

As it happens, we seem getting skillful at tracking our plagiarists, but again, probably precisely because plagiarism has become endemic among us. The latest caught has been a senator of the Republic himself, Vicente Sotto.

In a speech knocking the Reproductive Health Bill, which gives women the right to choose when to become pregnant by using contraceptives, Sotto not only plagiarized, but also committed concomitant wrongdoing. He stole wholesale from a blogger who supports the bill and twisted the stolen material out of context to support his opposite view. He said he had lost an infant son to side effects of the pill, a medical mystery he has refused to dwell on. Apparently missing applicable equivalents in law against all manner of thievery, he now claims that plagiarism is not a crime in this Republic; thus he arouses suspicions of his predisposition to it and betrays a narrow, self-serving sense of right and wrong. If he now blames his researchers and ghostwriters for his plagiarism, it more likely indicates a cowardly retreat by buck-passing than a reform in thinking or a change of heart.

For all his dangerous notions about plagiarism, Sotto finds ultimate company, an exact counterpart—Mariano del Castillo, associate justice of the Supreme Court. And here, properly ascribed, lest I be accused or self-plagiarism, I reproduce from BusinessWorld of August 2, 2010 parts of what I said about del Castillo’s case:

     There appears a tendency to minimize the trouble the Supreme Court has found itself in, to represent it as a case of benign plagiarism, and to parcel out the culpability away from the justices themselves.

     Some of the blame is laid, for instance, on the court researchers and rough-drafters at whose level court decisions, as a practical matter, begin to be written. The incredible impression is thus given that the justices are themselves left at the mercy of a mere process.

     Plagiarism, to be sure, can be committed in degrees across the whole range, from piecemeal to wholesale, from pilferages from a piece of writing to the theft of an entire work, and some instances may have actually slipped general notice or been left alone, although, doubtless, only because these have been insignificant.

     Which is certainly not the case with our case. This one extends beyond plain plagiarism into more serious forms of misrepresentation. And implicating as it does not just anyone but the Supreme Court no less, it lies scandalously beyond the pale. One of the plagiarized writers, Mark Ellis, has already e-mailed the court from London demanding an explanation.

     The case involves not only taking from works by him and other writers and appropriating the stolen material, but also manipulating it out of context to support a Supreme Court decision, made en banc…

     From one work alone, 34 sentences and citations have been determined lifted verbatim—the liftings are fewer from the other works, but substantially comparable still. The apparent trick employed, lest the purpose of the plagiarism be defeated, has been to confine the mining to material that is more or less neutral—particularly material that does not so much as hint at the writers’ position, since it runs counter to the court’s own.

      In that case, the decision could only have come before the argument. Or else why does the court have to rely extensively on material it has had yet to pinch and twist to purpose?

     The whole business reeks of arbitrariness and intellectual dishonesty. For his part alone, Ellis considers it “a most delicate issue,” one that affects “the integrity of my work as an academic and as an advocate of human rights and humanitarian justice.”

      As for ourselves, the implications cannot be overstated: as the character and integrity of our own Supreme Court come under a cloud, so does the quality of our justice in the last resort.

A further note, on the form in which the lifted material is presented: indented, set in a smaller typeface. This is to preclude any mistaken notion of originality. Another way is to set everything lifted in the same measure and typeface as the original, but in quotation marks, open-quoting at the beginning of every lifted paragraph and close-quoting at the end of the entire lifted material, not at the end of every lifted paragraph.

I hope I have covered all risks.