Emperor Bill Ackman got the president of Harvard fired for “plagiarism”. Now media are pulling a nice satisfying Gotcha on Emperor Ackman, noting that his wife also “plagiarized” some passages from Wikipedia.
Plagiarism is a fake issue and a fake outrage.
Copyright has specific rules. Copyright is about MONEY, not morality. There aren’t any copyright cops who can arrest you for violating someone else’s copyright. Enforcement always follows the basic rules of civil lawsuits. You can only bring a case if YOUR work was stolen and monetized. Otherwise you haven’t been materially harmed.
In both of these situations the original writers were not complaining. Wikipedia is generally public domain with Open Source licensing, except when it includes material that is already copyrighted elsewhere.
Plagiarism is a vague moral question, and it’s a blurry line.
Everyone copies everything all the time. If you’re not copying SOMETHING you’re speaking pure carefully randomized gibberish. It takes careful programming to generate a random combination that doesn’t include a recognizable pattern. The proverbial million monkeys on keyboards will always produce pieces of meaningful text among the majority of random junk.
Copying only becomes a real theft when the original material was fully copyrighted and registered, and when the owner of the original material complains in writing. Theft by AI is a real theft. It lifts copyrighted material along with public domain material, it republishes without any indication of source, and several of the victims (actors union, a group of fiction writers, NYTimes) have officially complained.
“Plagiarism” is an official justification for firing someone, when you want to fire them for personal reasons that can’t be used in an official document.
Polistra's Mill 