The plague of plagiarism

Recently, I came across a sad incident. A very good friend of mine had to shut her cooking blog that she loved so much because of the plague of plagiarism. I have known her since she married my friend. Over the years, she had developed a taste for cooking and started her own blog on cooking, complete with recipes she tried along with beautiful pictures of her creations. The blog went on to win quite a few awards and gave her good recognition within her 'cooking blog' peer group. More than awards, I felt she got personal satisfaction out of putting her recipes to print and sharing it with her friends and admirers.

A year or so back, she found out that a popular food website had taken one of her recipes and posted it on its own without a single line of credit. Her polite request to give her proper acknowledgment was met with indifference. Incensed, she posted the conversation on her site, eventually forcing the website to pull that recipe down. This was her first encounter with plagiarism.

I believe the next major encounter (maybe there were others in between that I do not know of) has what has led her to the decision of making her blog private. This time it was another person who had copied many of her recipes and posted on her own blog once again without any acknowledgment of the source. When questioned, the argument the copier posed was interesting - since almost everyone plagiarizes in one form or the other - be it a download or a torrent, what's wrong in her doing so? A good question indeed, but I don't think one that is fair by any means.

I have encountered blatant plagiarism while in college, probably the fertile playground for plagiarism. Couple of my friends in college copied my assignment in one of my favorite subjects and gave it to the professor. Like in most colleges now, my prof had a software to identify potential 'copies' and true enough, he found strong similarities between the three of our assignments. It was a C program where the logic was the same, but the difference was in variable names! The prof pulled us aside and gave all of us an 'F'. He was quite disappointed at me because I was getting consistent A+s in his subject. Probably for that sole reason he gave me a reprieve and told me that I can make up my grades if I did well in the next assignment, which thankfully I did. In this case, I never intended to copy or to be copied. I had given my assignment for 'reference' to my friends, who unfortunately, referred it a bit too much. So, whose fault was it - mine or theirs?

In this day of torrents, downloads, YouTube videos, and pirated CDs, it is very easy for our moral compass to point in the wrong direction. It has become so easy to flick someone else's work that it barely registers in our brain that what we are doing is wrong. Internet has made it so easy to get information that we forget that what we read or download is someone's hard work.

Even before the Internet, we used to do all this. We copied tapes. We photocopied books. Plagiarism was still there, but it was just a lot harder earlier.

As an author of a book, I know how much time and effort it takes to write a book. Unless your book sells like Harry Potter, the amount effort that's put in is highly disproportionate to the return that's obtained in the form of royalty. I spent almost 1 - 2 years intermittent effort (roughly 4-8 hours a week) to get a royalty of around $50!

But getting back to the point, was the person justified in arguing that since we plagiarize in one form or the other, we should not complain when someone plagiarizes our work? I don't think so.

Whether we care to admit or not, we are all hypocrites. We preach something and do something just the opposite. We proclaim that bribery is bad, but if it gets our work done, we are fine with it. We claim that nepotism is bad, but if our relatives get a good job, we are fine with it. We claim that favoritism is evil, but if we get preferred treatment that we don't deserve by merit, we are fine with it. This is not going to change.

However, what we do try is to change our slowly, over generations. While it may be too late for us to correct our mistakes, we try our best to ensure that our children are taught the right morals and hope that they will be better than us. While we may curse, we tell our children not to. That's what makes us human. By nature, we try to make our next generation better.

Thus, if not for the sake of ourselves, we need to start cultivating better habits so that our next generation has something to look forward to and not wallow in the same muddy waters that we are in. That would be my argument to the person who stole my friend's recipes, and more importantly, my friend's sense of trust in others. By setting a bad example, we may still survive, but we are just making the world a little worse down the road.

We cannot change a lot of things about ourselves, but there are some simple things that we can. One is to say "Thank you" to others when they offer a helping hand. The other is to acknowledge someone's work by thanking them for providing inspiration or information. It does not make our contribution any less important, rather it just makes us better humans.

And to my friend, I would say this as well - incidents like this will happen. If we let us be disillusioned by this, we are only robbing our next generation of our courage and our creativity. It is too precious to be robbed. Let's not give those with faulty judgment that pleasure.