In “Rhetorical Velocity and Copyright: A Case Study on Strategies of Rhetorical Delivery” Jim Ridolfo and Martine Courant Rife examine a situation in which Michigan State University used and remixed an image of student Maggie Ryan without permission for four sequential years. Ridolfo and Rife explain that the university procured a digital image of Maggie without her permission. Technically it is just an image of a human body, and digital images derived from a human body elude ownership in the traditional sense. This raises the question: does the right of using the image lie in the hands of the subject or of the photographer?
In “Plagiarism and Promiscuity, Authors and Plagiarisms,” Russel Wiebe explores the components, intricacies, and ideologies regarding plagiarism. Wiebe extends his anecdotal explanation to include the problems with plagiarism under the realm of photography. He notes that a wall in his office displays a simple photograph taken by his wife and claims “the ‘badness’ of my wife’s photo … cannot be separated or understood except in terms of its associations, which are not simply the intentions of the photographer or the viewer, but the unspeakable threshold upon which they meet.” This profound realization underlies how we treat the plagiarism problem.
Plagiarism tends to only be considered within the specific context it occurs and a lot of forces are at play when we conclude whether or not something is plagiarized. For instance, the accusation of plagiarism is frequently the product of hierarchical relationships. Wiebe uses observations by Brian Martin to arrive at this claim. “When a student borrows a paper to turn in for a class, that’s plagiarism. When an academic borrows another teacher’s materials to produce a class lecture without citation, that’s scholarship. When a supervisor takes credit for an underling’s work, that’s business.” Designating plagiarism is not solely based on whether someone presents someone else’s text as his own. It is rooted in where the plagiarist resides in a power structure.
Wiebe’s overarching solution to the problem of plagiarism is to stop viewing it as strictly a problem. His insight and incorporation of Lethem’s promiscuous materials, Levine’s re-photographs, and Robillard and Fortune’s examination of forgery help readers participate in the question of what plagiarism is and what circumstances classify it as such without seeing plagiarism as only a crime to be punished. Wiebe calls for everyone, especially teachers, to be able to do this. As a result, rather than teaching plagiarism as an impermissible crime that can be prevented through computer programming like TurnItIn, teachers can “embrace a discourse which includes an awareness of plagiarism as a foundation or a beginning” in their lesson plans.
The biggest problem with plagiarism is something that Wiebe mentioned and that is that there are so many kinds of plagiarism. The biggest problem with that is that students seem to usually only recognize one of the ideas of plagiarism and that is using sources and just pulling from them. They usually just look at using someone else's paper as cheating not really looking at it as plagiarizing.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of the photo with Maggie at her school, I think that the photographer would have more rights to a picture than the person in the picture. The photographer took the picture and Maggie knew he was around taking them so if she didn't want her picture taken should she have asked him not to. To top it all off, she was on the school's public property so the photographer had the right to be there as well, to cover the protest that Maggie was a part of.
I was talking to a college athlete and he felt the same way about this picture being taken as Maggie did. He felt as if he was being taken advantage of by the university because his picture is used to promote things that he isn't getting paid for. I don't think that the reuse of the photograph should be a problem for the person in it, especially in Maggie's case when she is not a well known person and her face is hardly in the picture.
Plagarism is a problem that needs to be discussed more and instead of being looked at as a crime, like Kelly Ritter mentioned, it should be "argued that a better response to whole-text plagiarism than punishment is to attempt an understanding of the motives that drive a student to purchase an essay"(Wiebe 36).