How it affects the forum, poets and poetry in general?
This is a serious discussion, not a witch hunt or an excuse for finger pointing.
Hopefully people will read this post and know it's a bannable offence. In this thread we want to define, if can the act of plagiarism, the taboo of plagiarism and to some extent how poets got to this point in history. any nasty shit such as all plagiarist must die etc will be removed. by all means say why you don't like them but in the context of a really serious discussion.
if we have to, i'll move the goal post but let's try and stick to the discussion at hand, i'll go first.
After doing quite a bit of reading up on the matter, i came to the conclusion that plagiarism as a moral crime is more of a modern phenomenon. before the 18oo's poets were enthused to copy the greats, to be as close to the masters works as possible in order to 'avoid unnecessary invention, (from a wiki) after that, plagiarism came to be, and all the nasty stuff connected with it grew out of poetry's romantic period, and here we are today.
i think in modern times of poetry, the poet found a unique voice and wanted to keep it. imagination began to rule the word and poets felt their imagination belonged to themselves; fuck off and get your own fucking imagination! now we guard what we have created, we have the right, maybe not legal but for the best part, moral and just.
we ask that poets quote other poets if they use their words. sadly it's not as clear cut as that. lot's of shakespearian sonnets are now cliche, widely used and abused. to use one of these cliche phrases is only classed as a sin against good poetry, yet should we use a lesser known phrase we run the risk of being called plagiarist. while a cliche is clearly not plagiarism, why would an unknown phrase be such?
then we move on to form. we've all tried our hands at a sonnet or two or a terza rima...thanks to the resident ma'am
by the very nature of doing so we commit an act of plagiarism! wtf you all cry and beat me senseless, we're not plaguing anything. the truth is stealing someone elses form is also classed as plagiarism.
the good thing though, is we ignore such thing in the circles of poetry, (the romantics came to like the forms of others so they decided that steal them we're in fact a really good thing to do. you can steal a form but not a phrase was the shout.
which is all good reading but does little for us here.
my idea of plagiarism is "i'm going to pass that persons work, or some that persons work as my own." and in committing such an act the guilty party crosses the line. sounds good but we hit a large problem. certain words a poet uses are common place. you fat bastard, for instance, is something i hear a lot. so for me it has to be a phrase with a palpable uniqueness.
the dog was licking his hairless balls, won't suffice for anyone but the lucky dog. cleaver rasped a testicle lovingly, on the other testicle, would.
so the phrase has to be unique. how many words should an offending phrase be! you shout, and i have no idea. i did read somewhere that if it's more than 6 it's plagiarism and i think that a good arbitrary number to work with. so for me a phrase with (more) than 6 words that are the same or too similar to be a coincidence does the trick.
after all that i have to admit to being a bit of a hypocrite. (to some extent) for me the crime isn't about stealing someone's work, that's really secondary and doesn't even come near to rocking my boat. the crime, the only crime for me is passing it off as your own. in a poetry community it shows every poet that you can't be trusted to acknowledge another poets work. that's the crime and in a closed community like ours it verges on being horrendous for some. people say, with a chance of publishing etc.
so fr the latter statements i gave plagiarists will be banned.
This is a serious discussion, not a witch hunt or an excuse for finger pointing.
Hopefully people will read this post and know it's a bannable offence. In this thread we want to define, if can the act of plagiarism, the taboo of plagiarism and to some extent how poets got to this point in history. any nasty shit such as all plagiarist must die etc will be removed. by all means say why you don't like them but in the context of a really serious discussion.
if we have to, i'll move the goal post but let's try and stick to the discussion at hand, i'll go first.
After doing quite a bit of reading up on the matter, i came to the conclusion that plagiarism as a moral crime is more of a modern phenomenon. before the 18oo's poets were enthused to copy the greats, to be as close to the masters works as possible in order to 'avoid unnecessary invention, (from a wiki) after that, plagiarism came to be, and all the nasty stuff connected with it grew out of poetry's romantic period, and here we are today.
i think in modern times of poetry, the poet found a unique voice and wanted to keep it. imagination began to rule the word and poets felt their imagination belonged to themselves; fuck off and get your own fucking imagination! now we guard what we have created, we have the right, maybe not legal but for the best part, moral and just.
we ask that poets quote other poets if they use their words. sadly it's not as clear cut as that. lot's of shakespearian sonnets are now cliche, widely used and abused. to use one of these cliche phrases is only classed as a sin against good poetry, yet should we use a lesser known phrase we run the risk of being called plagiarist. while a cliche is clearly not plagiarism, why would an unknown phrase be such?
then we move on to form. we've all tried our hands at a sonnet or two or a terza rima...thanks to the resident ma'am
by the very nature of doing so we commit an act of plagiarism! wtf you all cry and beat me senseless, we're not plaguing anything. the truth is stealing someone elses form is also classed as plagiarism.
the good thing though, is we ignore such thing in the circles of poetry, (the romantics came to like the forms of others so they decided that steal them we're in fact a really good thing to do. you can steal a form but not a phrase was the shout.
which is all good reading but does little for us here.
my idea of plagiarism is "i'm going to pass that persons work, or some that persons work as my own." and in committing such an act the guilty party crosses the line. sounds good but we hit a large problem. certain words a poet uses are common place. you fat bastard, for instance, is something i hear a lot. so for me it has to be a phrase with a palpable uniqueness.
the dog was licking his hairless balls, won't suffice for anyone but the lucky dog. cleaver rasped a testicle lovingly, on the other testicle, would.
so the phrase has to be unique. how many words should an offending phrase be! you shout, and i have no idea. i did read somewhere that if it's more than 6 it's plagiarism and i think that a good arbitrary number to work with. so for me a phrase with (more) than 6 words that are the same or too similar to be a coincidence does the trick.
after all that i have to admit to being a bit of a hypocrite. (to some extent) for me the crime isn't about stealing someone's work, that's really secondary and doesn't even come near to rocking my boat. the crime, the only crime for me is passing it off as your own. in a poetry community it shows every poet that you can't be trusted to acknowledge another poets work. that's the crime and in a closed community like ours it verges on being horrendous for some. people say, with a chance of publishing etc.
so fr the latter statements i gave plagiarists will be banned.