STANLEY FISH: PLAGIARISM IS NOT A BIG MORAL DEAL

WAS SHAKESPEARE A PLAGIARIST?

There’s a lot written on the internet about ‘plagiarism’. I write a lot about it. Some of it shows good insight and intelligence and some doesn’t. It is a popular practice to reference and link to articles written in newspapers as a way of supporting a point of view. I read a lot of these, the internet scribblings and the newsprint. It is a subject that interests me and one that, it seems to me, is dividing academics and writers. We seem to be moving towards a crisis in our thinking on matters related to authorship and originality and ownership.

In an article in the New York Times by an academic called Stanley Fish (Stanley Fish: Plagiarism Is Not A Big Moral Deal), he cites a personal experience of seeing a couple of his written pages appearing in a colleague’s book almost verbatim. His upset at this theft has stayed with him and has fuelled his musings on the subject of plagiarism. I can understand his upset and I think he does have a case here: his written words were used without attribution and without permission, even if the chain of that theft meant that his colleagues were more lazy than criminal.

In the same article Fish cuts through all the philosophical and intellectual debate and dwells on the accepted ‘club rules’ for what is permitted in terms of copying and attribution. He compares it to the rules of golf (and I could not help but think of the film ‘Happy Gilmore’!) Fish is talking about words for the most part, and perhaps academic ideas. In fact he says: “But if you’re a musician or a novelist, the boundary lines are less clear (although there certainly are some)”. And for me there is something important here that is missed by many internet writers who appropiate the support of people like Fish for their arguments against plagiarism, and that is the distinction between copying of actual words and the using of another’s ideas especially if we are talking creative ideas.

Shakespeare’s play ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is not in one sense original. The plot in its entirety existed in several forms before Shakespeare decided to use them as the basis for a play. Even a cursory look at the source material for his play will demonstrate how much Shakespeare’s play depends on its source material. But he did not, I think, use the words from the source material. Instead he wrote his own poetry. For me, this means that Shakespeare is not a plagiarist. You may want to say that he ripped off these other writers; you may even have a view on that; but what he wrote was his own – his own words – and what he did with the material was original and fresh and new, and what he produced was superior to anything that had gone before.

Someone once said flippantly of plagiarism, and rather simplistically, ‘theft is theft’. The fact that notable academics all over the world are now writing papers such as Fish’s article, and disagreeing on the many issues related to plagiarism, demonstrates one certainty: the matter of plagiarism is not one that is simple. Many of the articles I have read are to do with academic plagiarism. The free availability of information through the internet and the ease with which this can be copied and pasted and the habits of illegal downloading of music and movies through computers by young people, means that there is a crisis in our universities in this regard. But to jump from that to saying that ‘Life of Pi’ by Yann Martell is plagiarism because he got the idea from another written book is a frighteningly hard body-blow for creativity.

The world of literature is dominated by writers who have appropriated the ideas of other people and who have then made them their own, given them new life or a different life. The rules that Stanley Fish talks about in his article do not obviously apply to this area of ‘imitation’. If a writer pens a story about punk androids that do not know they are androids, we are not then to assume that the writer owns the idea of androids thinking they are human and not knowing the difference. Another writer can come along and write a story or film about android children that think they are real children and do not know the difference. It would be absurd for this not to be possible. The thinking of Thomas Jefferson when he and his contemporaries were examining issues of intellectual property and laws to protect innovators, allowed for this: the free movement of ideas. Stanley Fish is writing about the verbatim theft of words or the lifting of academic ideas. Setting aside the ‘sampling’ debate of the new music and the new writers (Helene Hegeman), it is easy to see that the rules that exist in copyright laws apply to this specific type of theft and it is easy to understand those ‘club rules’. But the law regarding the use of another’s creative ideas is not and cannot be so clear cut; nor can any thinking on this matter be so removed from debate about philosophy and theories of mind and an understanding of how thinking works and how creativity works.

Stanley Fish says plagiarism is a 'learned sin'; but he is referring specifically to the obvious theft of another's words. He is not here addressing the creative use of another's creative ideas. It is not just that the issues here are greyer and harder to define; it is that creativity involves an artist interacting with the world and everything in the world; ideas of the creative kind are so dependent on that interaction and on the complex way that the mind works and on the acknowledged imitative element in art and on a recognition that there is such a thing as the creative subconscious, that issues to do with overstepping the 'club rules' are not ever so clear cut or so easy. That is why copyright law stipulates that an idea may be copied - because the alternative would be detrimental to the whole development of art and literature.