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Produsage -- the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement (Bruns, 2008, p. 21).
Lots of related concepts intertwined here -- community, collaboration, content -- along with
"Generation C" themes of "creativity, causal collapse, control and celebrity" (Bruns, 2008, p. 5).
With a paradigm shift from individual to communal, commercial to free, product to process, and push to pull, important questions arise about intellectual property and plagiarism. With ubiquitously accessible information and a publish then filter mentality, is it possible that Generation C has abandoned as outdated notions of academic integrity and plagiarism?
This week, I encountered the most egregious case of academic dishonesty of my nearly 30 history in academia. A graduate student submitted a paper that was 96% (SafeAssign score) matched to published material without any attribution. The student had lifted excerpts and abstracts (without accessing the full source) verbatim and dropped these "cut and paste" sections into her submission. Save a few lines that were minimally paraphrased (substituting a single word in a long passage), the paper was 100% the published work of other authors. Her reference list included references cited by the original source. In other words, lifting from Dennen, if Dennen said, "Davis (2008) reports ...." then the student cited Davis, not Dennen.
The student did not believe that she had violated the Code of Academic Integrity. Perhaps, she believes the arrangement of the five sources was her granular creative contribution and therefore she shared ownership of the final product.
I think this begs the question of substantive contribution. Moore Moore v. Regents of the University of California is a landmark case that deals with body part property rights. In a nutshell, Dr. David Godle had developed a commercial cell line for cancer research utilizing tissue samples from Mr. John Moore. Mr. Moore claimed a right to share in the profits from the cell line since his (discarded) body parts were instrumental in developing the line. This is but one example from many in clinical research where pharma develops a product with a mega-billion dollar profit from samples provided by volunteer participants.
What is value each contribution -- tissue versus intellectual property of developing a cell line?
Is there a qualitative difference between writing content and arranging content? Does equipotentiality, granularity and shared (not owned) content necessarily result in a causal collapse of recognition and protection of intellectual property and an erosion of academic integrity?
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WOW, what a week for you!
ReplyDeleteIn the past, people spent entire careers with a single employer. In that setting the mandatory signing-over of patent rights to things done at work is not a great stretch. But how about today? Many corporations require employees to sign waivers granting the employer rights to all inventions the employee develops while employed there. Does this seem fair and equitable to all parties?
This topic is so interesting. On the one hand, there's the "same old same old" sense of it being plagiarism, and it absolutely is in our academic context. (Incidentally, I've seen papers with such a high level of quoting that they would trigger at least an 80% -- generally cases in which students don't feel secure enough to use their own words/theses and feel they must hide behind the words of the so-called experts. They do give attribution, at least.) However, when you think about it in light of what happens in a lot of Web 2.0 applications, where we seek aggregation and consider it somewhat of a creative act itself, the argument that the student's contribution was the arrangement of these bits at least begins to have some sense of coherent logic although there still is no excuse for the lack of attribution.
ReplyDeleteI'm immediately reminded of discussions had back when I was in the fine arts about artists who did not start with a blank canvas but instead incorporated or built directly on what others had already created. Without the earlier works, the later ones would not exist -- in a very concrete manner, not just in the traditional manner of inspiration or influence. So is there one artist? Or many? Who should profit?
Now we see (well, hear) the same done in music, too. And of course online. The guidelines for attribution when repurposing or rearranging in some contexts seem to be fuzzier territory than traditional academic writing and attributions for many people -- and I'm not sure if the legal profession has it all settled out either.
Thank you for your comments. 30 years ago we had this discussion with "Found Poetry." Found poetry is essentially published works rearranged for poetic effect -- a line here, an ad there. Very powerful. Didn't even discuss issues of intellectual property or attribution -- we were busy debating -- is it poetry?
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