[TAG] A case of copyright violation / plagiarism?

[Rick Moen]

Hullo again.  Back from my restorative sojourn in the land of nod.

Quoting Benjamin A. Okopnik (ben at linuxgazette.net):

> However, the disagreement here appears to pivot solely on the
> definition of "plagiarism", not on the actual issues of the incident
> just past.

Quite.  I contended that use of that term (introduced _not_ by you
but by Baishampayan in his original post; thereafter firmly if quietly
omitted from my own reply to him) would unintentionally mislead anyone
closer than us old fogies to the insane punctilio required by university
honour codes and such.

> I, and I believe Kapil as well, were using the "substantive literal
> copying without citation" definition (admittedly without explicitly
> saying so) - in fact, I believe that to be the commonly-used meaning
> of the word _except_ in the ivory towers where that kind of
> microtome-based disassembly is practiced.

Well, is your and Kapil's concern limited to _literal_ copying?  Isn't
writing "I'm not much of an altruist, but frankly it's pretty obvious
that three people's troubles don't amount to much in the long term,
anyway" still ripping^W riffing off "Casablanca"?

  "I'm scandalised, scandalised, I tell you, to hear there's wagering 
  occuring in this casino!"

  "Your payoff, sir."

-- 
Cheers,           find / -user your -name base -print | xargs chown us:us
Rick ("Encore performance please, Sam") Moen
rick at linuxmafia.com