Copying and pasting

Young students today are known as the “Copy and Paste Generation” (or “Cut and Paste Generation”) for a very good reason. It is almost impossible for a student to resist the temptation to merely copy and paste materials found on the Web to fulfil a course requirement.

In August 2010, The New York Times raised the alarm that plagiarism (the academic term for copying and pasting) was starting to be regarded as the norm rather than an immoral act.

In an article “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age” by Trip Gabriel, anthropologist Susan D. Blum was quoted as saying that “the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged. Our notion of authorship and originality was born, it flourished, and it may be waning.”

Mentioning the Enlightenment brings the debate into the realm of ideas, instead of the realm of student discipline where plagiarism is often discussed. Teachers hate plagiarized term papers because they are forced to grade them according to how they were written rather than what they say. After all, if a student plagiarizes say, from Aristotle, a teacher cannot possibly give a failing mark to that philosopher’s ideas.

The problem with the Enlightenment was that it was not very enlightened. Newton, Descartes, Hume, Voltaire, and company thought that reason and science ruled the world, or should, anyway. Since then, lots of intellectuals have earned degrees and higher professorial ranks making fun of the Enlightenment, inventing words like “Deconstruction” and “Marxism” in the process. Reason and science lost their haughtiness when various warmongers (exemplified, of course, by Hitler and Stalin, and more recently, by Bush and Bin Laden) showed that power need not proceed from rational thinking. (Forgive me for not mentioning Philippine examples of irrational power.)

Young students today, unbeknownst to them, grew up in an atmosphere of non-Euclidean logic (an oxymoron born during the moronic campaign of Sarah Palin). Young students believe both that individuals should prevail (as the Enlightenment naively believed) and that individuals should not prevail (as everybody since just as naively believes). The result of the abandonment of the principle of non-contradiction is social media.

As Blum so cleverly pointed out, a typical student today does not have only one identity. He or she (or any variation of gender) creates multiple identities on social media. One more (that of aping someone else) is no big deal. In the Philippines, in fact, many (if not most) young people have more than one cellphone, the better to text something on one that one dare not text on the other.

In other words, when a student copies and pastes something from the Web into a term paper that s/he submits to a teacher, that student merely puts on another face (“to meet the faces that s/he meets,” to plagiarize T. S. Eliot). Blum theorizes that the student may actually be that plagiarized or pirated person at that very moment, so who is the teacher to complain?

That brings us to the topic of the international conference tomorrow (Friday, Sept. 19) in conjunction with the 35th Manila International Book Fair at the SMX. Sponsored by the Filipinas Licensing and Copyright Society (FILCOLS), which I head (that’s for disclosure purposes and not because I actually did any work organizing it, since all the work was done by Executive Director Alvin J. Buenaventura and his extraordinary staff), the conference is entitled “Copy & Repro: International Conference on IP Policies and Copyright Licensing for Schools and Universities.”

If you are a school official, you might want to attend the whole-day conference (registration starts at 9 a.m.). It is not really about plagiarism, but you might learn a thing or two about copyright and intellectual property. You could learn about how the country is trying very hard not to be a notorious haven of intellectual property thieves, why schools could be criminally liable for having teachers and students copy whole books either through photocopiers or digitally, what in heaven’s name is “fair use,” and why licensing could save your neck (or at least the school’s reputation, not to mention money when the inevitable lawsuits start).

You will be, in short, enlightened.

TO WATCH OUT FOR: At the Book Fair, you may want to pick up the Filipino translations of our basic laws. Retired RTC Judge Cezar Peralejo, who believes that all Filipinos (and not only English-speaking lawyers) should understand the law, singlehandedly translated the Civil Code, the Revised Penal Code, the Local Government Code, the Family Code, and various other laws into Filipino. Buy them at the Central Books booth.

Incidentally, Central Books is again sponsoring my annual talk at the Book Fair on “How to Write a Book.” That workshop has resulted in a number of books by first-time authors. If you want to write your own book, you might want to attend the session on Sunday (Sept. 21), 3:45 p.m. at SMX.