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Plagiarism: blame the staffer!

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

Related to a recent accusation that Connecticut Republican Senate candidate Rob Simmons' "plan for prosperity" contained portions copied without attribution from talking points on the Web site of the National Federation of Independent Business, the AP reported:

"The campaign manager for Simmons, a former U.S. congressman, blamed the error on a young staffer who borrowed the words without attribution."

The "blame the staffer" theme was present when New Jersey Congressman Bill Pascrell Jr. (Democrat) was snagged inserting lobbyist text into the Congressional Record: ?I regret that the language was the same. I did not know it was.? He said he got his statement from his staff and ?did not know where they got the information from.?

Similarly, when stem cell researcher Karim Nayernia was snagged for copying in a research paper, later retracted, a post-doc was blamed.

Going back to the Laurence Tribe plagiarism incident, Dean Velvel put forth the theory that it was not plagiarism by Tribe as much as ghost-writing, wherein the ghost-writer did the plagiarism and Tribe didn't notice it. When snagged, Tribe took the choice of apologizing for the plagiarism rather than acknowledging he didn't write the work at all.

All incidents do reflect an interesting point: the "author" of the plagiarized work did not take the time to review the work, and, the identification of the plagiarized work was by someone other than the author.

In passing, the Hartford Courant account of the incident was careful to give attribution to an earlier AP story. The Courant itself was enmeshed in a plagiarism problem related to lifting local stories from smaller newspapers without attribution.

**Previous IPBiz posts:

Ghost-writing (plagiarism) in the biosimilar business?

British science paper on "sperm from stem cells" retracted!

**AP story Comparison of language used by Simmons, biz group

Full post as published by IPBiz on March 04, 2010 (boomark / email).