Reading Response to "It wasn't me, was it?"

I found "It Wasn't Me, Was It?" to be the most interesting reading for this week, as far as plagiarism is concerned. "Champing at the Bit" was a nicely comprehensive yet lucid explanation of copyright laws and their trend toward favoring the author, but DeVoss and Rosati's essay hit on some really important points, including:

"American academic writing is full of often conflicting complications, the most obvious of which is expecting students to come up with and develop an original idea, while requiring them to find plenty of material to back up their supposedly new and original idea or perspective on a subject" (155).

The paradox of the original research-paper has always caused students difficulties, ranging from coming up with the original idea to finding sources to support it to preventing plagiarism. As DeVoss and Rosati point out, students often struggle to determine what counts as "common knowledge" versus what must be cited, and they sometimes engage in what Rebecca Moore Howard calls patchwriting in which they work through new concepts or information by splicing an original passage with their own writing. Howard thinks this should be given a positive value as a step in one's progress as a writer. DeVoss and Rosati steer clear of such judgments, focusing on presenting information and discussing the impact of the internet on plagiarism. Essentially, they suggest that teachers engage students in discussions of intellectual property rights, critical online research, and the like.

DeVoss and Rosati miss an opportunity to really consider how the internet is changing--and will change--our views of plagiarism and authorship. If a student scours the internet for information, selects dozens of pieces of information (text, pictures, video, etc.), and then pieces it all together into something new and original, should this be considered plagiarism if none of it is cited? If someone posts something on the internet, isn't that tantamount to saying, "Here, use this."

Let me be clear: I am not referring to copying and pasting text; if I copy and paste someone's writing, then I have copied rather than created, and that is plagiarism simply because my creativity has no hand in the creation. I am also not referring to photographs or other media that are encrypted or protected; obviously, the author of this material is not saying, "Here, use this."

But if I synthesize a variety of resources, using my creative transitioning or splicing, then am I plagiarizing, patchwriting, or authoring an original document based on research (a research paper without the artifice of "good paraphrasing"). The power of the internet as a research tool--its ease of accessing, collecting, and copying large amounts of data or media--will eventually force a change in the academic view of plagiarism and authorship. If nothing else, teachers can google images or videos just as easily as the students, thus nullifying the need to cite them, especially since the citation amounts to a "type this into google" instruction.

Teachers can also google the text to check for originality, in which case they may find that their students have done a rather remarkable job of collecting, synthesizing, and presenting a broad array of seemingly disparate sources, in a surprisingly original and individual manner. If this occurs often enough in the future, will we see it as plagiarism resulting from poor research skills or a poor understanding of copyright? Or will we view it as a more honest (and technologically advanced) version of the "original" research-paper?