A plagiarism question

Actually, you can plagiarize yourself if you sold certain rights to the piece. If Debbie sold all rights to the article to the magazine, then Lori may have a case against Debbie for plagiarizing Lori's work, but Lori can't use the material without plagiarizing from the magazine that bought the rights.
I wouldn't find this scenario very convincing.

What you may want to look at is 'copyrght infringement'.

Plagiarism is an ethical question much mooted at school. Copyright infringement is a legal issue you take to court.
For the differenc between them, see the wiki here
For an introduction to copyright see here


In direct answer to your question,
sorta ...
'a piece of information' cannot be copyrighted.
It generally can't be 'plagiarized' either.

Information is just information.

That said, you can probably prod this scenario a little to make it do what you want. You just have to do your homework on copyright law.

The red flag is the question about rights sold. You used the word report- was this for school or work? Who owns it? Was Debbie given a byline? That should fill in some gaps.
Also for such a copyright infringement lawsuit to be viable or worth it there would have to be money/payment involved. Just my .02 centavos.

Sullying reputation or getting somebody fired -- plagiarism works fine.

Since you're keeping this out of the legal system you have a lot of freedom.
i.e. -- 'Betty stole my idea on how to structure the McFinkle Company debt repayments,'
works fine, as does
'That's my dirty limerick she wrote on the lavatory wall.'

It isn't a question of 'does this meet Stanford's policy on plagiarism?' or 'does this constitute loss of use under common law?'

It's 'does this offend Mr. Waldorf's sense of fair play?' and that can be anything you want.

The premise of your subplot looks solid to me. The only thing I'm a little sketchy on is what do you mean by "Oringinal File." I wouldn't think a computer file would be very useful when it comes to proving who wrote something.

Vandal said:

1999: Debbie takes the information that Lori provides her and has it published (for free) in a small trade magazine under Debbie's byline.

Six years later, Lori recalls an anecdote that she wrote for Debbie's piece and uses it in her own article.

Click to expand...

Neither infringing nor plagiarism ... re-use of a bit of information in another piece is perfectly legal. If it weren't, there would only be ONE book on any given subject.

Vandal said:

The file will be on the hard drive of Lori's old computer (perhaps an old Mac) with a 1999 date. It should be enough to convince her boss that she wrote it (why else would she have it?).

Click to expand...

Working with this plot, you'd probably want to pull in some computer expertise.
I mean, no reason this scenario wouldn't convince your character, but you should know the ins and outs of this when you write it.

Keep in mind that file dates are EASY TO CHANGE! They are not proof of anything.

Vandal said:

Here's the scene I have in mind:

Lori, young and naive, helps Debbie with a biographical report. Lori pretty much writes the whole thing and Debbie later gets it published in some non-descript magazine, unbeknowst to Lori.

Six years later, Lori uses a bit of the information from the old article in a new article. Debbie accuses her of plagiarism. Lori claims she was the true author of the original article and she can't plagiarize herself, although Debbie's name is in the byline.

Is this scenario possible/believable?

Also, if Lori finds her original material on, say, an old computer, would that get her off the hook by proving she wrote it?

Thanks. I hope this isn't too confusing.

Click to expand...

For sake of argument and to keep things interesting, I'll presume "a bit of information" is actually a couple of paragraphs taken nearly verbatim from the original article. This would make it flat-out copyright infringement presuming Debbie has the copyright (whether rightfully or wrongfully).

Tsu Dho Nimh said:

Keep in mind that file dates are EASY TO CHANGE! They are not proof of anything.

Click to expand...

Yes, it's as easy as changing your computer's date and time to the desired values, loading a word processing file, and saving it under a new filename. But most people (unless they just read that last sentence) don't even know that.

If you want reasonably good evidence that Lori wrote it, invent a newsgroup, say misc.writing.biographical-reports, that Lori asked questions on when writing the thing, even including a few paragraphs from an early draft. These posts would be saved in the archives in groups.google.com as well as in a few other Usenet archive sites. Such archives are very hard to forge.

Also, web-based forums such as here on Absolute Write usually have their posts indexed by Google, and even if the site has gone down or changed over the years (such as eliminating the BBS/forum portion), posts would still remain index in Google's cache, archive.org, or perhaps some other Internet archiving site.

If you really want to make it complicated and interesting , have Lori post early drafts in a password-protected forum like AW's "SYW" forums. They do NOT get indexed/saved (because the poor spider doesn't have the password), but she might remember some of the people on that forum who would be able to testify that it was her work.

Of course, all this is work would only be done only if this is to be presented in a court of law, or some equivalently serious situation. If it's just going to make Lori lose her job where a supervisor's decision hinges solely on believing Debbie over Lori, well, just chalk it up as one of the ironies of life.

Vandal said:

Six years later, Lori uses a bit of the information from the old article in a new article. Debbie accuses her of plagiarism.

Click to expand...

If it's just biographical information (you said it was a "biographical article"), I have trouble seeing how she could be accused of plagiarism. The only way I can imagine someone being guilty of plagiarism for including biographical information in something they write is if the original article (i.e. the one Debbie published) was based on original research by Debbie (or her research assistant), and the new article didn't credit Debbie's article, AND the new article was the type of article in which sources are normally credited. For example, academic articles always credit sources with footnotes; newspaper articles never have footnotes; magazine articles sometimes have footnotes... So if Lori wrote an academic article including information that was not known to the public until Debbie's article was published, and she failed to cite Debbie's article in her footnotes, then yeah, she could be accused of plagiarism

The reason I homed in on the nature of the thing copied--that is, on the fact that it's biographical information--is because there's a difference between information and expression: if Lori copied actual sentences from Debbie's article, that would definitely be plagiarism, but merely relaying information that's already publicly available is not plagiarism. When it's just information, not actual quotes or paraphrasing of the other article, it isn't plagiarism unless you try to pass yourself off as the source of the information when you actually got it from someone else (e.g. from Debbie's article). In academic articles, you always cite your sources so it's clear you're not claiming to be the original source of the information.

If Lori fails to cite Debbie's article, she could certainly argue that she researched and wrote that article, and that even if the rights to it were sold to the magazine Debbie published it in, Debbie didn't have the right to sell it without Lori's consent, etc. etc. But if the information WASN'T based on original research--i.e. if Lori just wrote an article for Debbie and neither of them did any original research, but just read other people's articles or encyclopedias or whatever to get the information--then it's just publicly available information, nobody "owns" it, nobody has been plagiarized.

It would clarify the issue if you could say what kind of articles you're talking about--academic? Or articles in women's magazines? or what?--and what exactly was copied/re-used.