Notes

Authorship and plagiarism

Can anybody own an idea? The only reasonable answer is "No!". Ideas don't come to people from nowhere - they are born as a collective effect, a result of numerous acts of communication with other people. It does not matter how the idea is expressed by a particular person - its only way of existence is vast circulation among the minds, and a variety of manifestations in the activity of the individuals.

When somebody creates something, one can be sure that the work of many other people has been used, directly or indirectly. Every act is culturally mediated, and thus always borrowing from the pool of forms, skills, trends and tendencies currently present. It would be as absurd to sue somebody for using somebody else's idea as to sue non-native English speakers for using English!

Why is it so frustrating and annoying when somebody "steals" an idea from somebody? Why is it considered unethical and unacceptable? The origin of such an attitude lies in the nature of capitalism, which transforms everything into trade values, abstracting from the actual contents. Thus, any product becomes mere representative of a definite amount of money, rather than what it actually is. When an author of a book is indignant about somebody's publishing it under another name, the presumed author of the original does not worry about spreading the ideas expressed and the results obtained - the question is who will get money, and in what proportion. It does not matter whether it will be a single person, or a group of authors, as long as the main goal of the publication is to somehow profit from it (which is eventually equivalent to sharing money).

The principles of public wealth distribution are quite abstract under capitalism, depending more on the part of wealth already owned, rather than on the owner's participation in the economical and cultural progress. For example, of two people with the same idea, the richer will most probably find the ways for its implementation, while the poorer will be bound to lag behind, wasting more efforts on base survival than on the development of the idea. The former is never considering his/her privileged position as a gift from the society, and is hardly ever apt to neither refer to those who produced that wealth, nor share the fees with them. Is it very different if one person has more access to publishing facilities than another and publishes what another just meant to publish? They both get their income from the work of all the rest of humanity, directly or indirectly using the products just partially paid. They both are "thieves", but they also "rob" each other.

The notion of authorship has developed together with capitalism, and in a more reasonably organized society, there would be no need to know where anything came from. If one can do something, let him/her do it, without any thoughts of the possible profit. If one person chooses to repeat the work of another (whom he/she may never know), it will only be profitable for the society as a whole, since the total amount of public wealth will grow as a result, increasing everybody's ability to get access to anything produced. The other side of it is the improvement of the products themselves, since they will not be overloaded with formality of tradition and the ballast of references.

Of course, living in the society which makes people steal bread from each other, people have to behave as this society dictates, if they want to live on and continue their work. There is always a compromise with one's conscience, and different people draw the line differently. Hence, the only excuse may be that one's actions help the humanity to get off the savage state. This, however, does not make things easier for an individual, since it is often difficult to say which actions (or which aspects of an action) were justified, and which were not. There is a psychological problem deserving a serious exploration.

One could say that, besides economical reasons, there is academic honesty which would not permit people steal somebody else's ideas and lie. Yes, there is. But the only reason for a lie is that it may be profited from. So, academic honesty is bound to be mainly kept by those who have a solid social position already, for whom any stealth would seem a kind of perversion. Moreover, this honesty will often be their weapon against any intruders: as it often occurs, high-ranked "academicians" are rarely restricting themselves with academic honesty, while they carefully check that poorer researchers without an official position never forget to mention the publications of the boss, even if not relevant. Stealth and lie will disappear when there will be no social and economical grounds for them. And no reference to somebody else's work will be not needed, except in an introductory overview, or for the purpose of showing respect for somebody's efforts in the field (which has no relation to the contents of the work, however). Naturally, such details may be interesting for the history of science, which is a separate science, with its own scope of problems.

Finally, for a really new idea, the problem is not who will publish it first, but rather who will dare to declare it in public. If a person with a name is brave enough to risk his/her reputation and put his/her signature under the words of someone who has no other way to publish a radical thought, this is a kind of plagiarism that should be always encouraged. Drastic solutions have few chances to get public (and especially in a copyrighted way). Usually, they can but gradually penetrate the minds showing up in quite different persons in different countries. This may be either independent development, or (which is more likely) a distant echo of one's contacts with many people, who carry one's ideas away in their subconscious and pass them to a wider range of people, without even being aware of that. Anyway, the appearance of the same ideas in the works of the others is a good sign: one may be more confident that one's mad ideas are not in vain, since they get accepted at last. This is an indication of their truth.