Posts by Keir Leslie
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You know, `failing' is not a synonym for `unprofitable'.
Or are you arguing that the state should legislate to create a market for things?
You do realise that this is what copyright is, right? The state creating a market in something in order to ensure economically efficient production? I mean, it is hardly a novel idea that the state should intervene here. (again, public good problem.)
There is no risk that our musicians and writers will contract someone in Mumbai or Beijing to generate that which currently comes from our shores.
Yes, LA, that well known part of Auckland.
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Well, it means this:
What that tells us is that there are ways in which plagiarism is subjective.
I would say that's blindingly obvious personally, and blindingly pointless. Yes, plagiarism is subjective, and you have successfully proven that the chap who has a mathematical formula for this is wasting his time. So what?
A great many useful and coherent concepts are subjective --- handball in football, as opposed to, say, who has the throw-in, is subjective. Yet we can use the concept of handball very well in general.
You have to go on to prove that this subjectivity fatally undermines the concept of plagiarism, you can't just stop there. But you and David do this all the time: look, here, we have proven a naive notion of authorship is in some ways problematic! Authors don't exist.
Well, no, that's not really true.
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I am "clear" on the standard definition of plagiarism.
Er, you asked if attribution was essential to the issue of plagiarism; given that yes it really rather is, I can see why Giovanni was a bit suspicious. (& the refusal to acknowledge deceit as important to plagiarism makes me wonder.)
Part of me wonders if writing has to -- and will -- catch up.
See, this is what annoys me. Instead of looking at the medium as a thing-in-itself, it just becomes a bad version of painting, or film, or whatever, You and David aren't engaging with the medium at all, you're just doing rough translations to film/painting and then acting surprised when the translation isn't exact. You also have a tendency to play fast and loose with terminology: is `strongly reminiscent' plagiarism?
(The tendency to take a naive definition of a concept, prove the naive definition is incapable of dealing with a pathological case, and then announce that the concept is bankrupt isn't particularly impressive.)
Dunno, I rather hate myself for this kind of arguing, where you merely pick holes and don't actually advance any positive ideas yourself, but as far as I can tell David and Philip have positions so difficult to actually grasp there's not much else you can do. (And David tends to play the contrarian two-step; one minute it is `yay plagiarism' the next `artistic influence is a very complicated issue.' Yes, we know that, so what? We can make plagiarism as subtle a concept in response.)
ETA Er, pwned by Giovanni.
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On the name thing: (a) most people will just say New Zealand, see Italy, Ghana, Nigeria etc, (b) everyone in South Africa will know it's just about the colour of the shirts.
(And this will be the most anti-racist footballing event ever; Fifa are going to make sure everyone in the world knows that Nelson Mandela and the rest of the ANC played football on Robben Island etc etc.)
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Keir, I didn't mention ethnicity. Obviously if I'm the sixth generation then a process of elimination says I'm almost certainly pakeha, but it wasn't me who said "white New Zealander".
Fair enough; I was mainly responding to Tom.
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It's no accident that pharmaceuticals are more expensive in the US than almost anywhere else.
Is utterly mad, I mean ffs, US health care, what might explain high costs? Oh, that's right, the truly truly fucked up US health care funding system.
There is now no cost to distributing information.
Right. So we have a non-rival and non-excludable good. Can anyone say `public good problem'?
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Why is it always nth gen white New Zealanders? Why not nth gen Chinese New Zealander or whatever?
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Copyright and plagiarism are mainly unrelated things; I can't infringe on Poe's copyright, but I sure as hell could plagiarise him. (And passing off is different from copyright in particular.)
Also, you are (a) imposing particularly naive standards of attribution --- not all attribution consists of footnoted bibliographic reference, and (b) ignoring the idea of paraphrase.
Plagiarism and so-forth are surprisingly robust concepts. Basically, you are hunting out pathological cases* and then assuming you've done much of anything beyond prove that we don't live in a perfectly neat world.
* And even allowing for the fact you are looking for pathological cases, and using purposefully pathological cases, you aren't really doing much damage to the concepts involved. Mainly you've shown that we have to be careful about our definitions of the art object. A quite straightforward application of Danto solves most all the problems here. The only at all difficult issue is the Botticelli, which can be dealt with through repeated applications of paraphrase & attribution.
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My argument is that you don't have a very good idea about what plagiarism actually is, and that you are failing to consider writing as a medium in-itself, as opposed to a failed version of painting.
I mean,
If she hadn't included the original artists' name in the titles, would that have changed them from quotations into plagiarism?
Really? Are you actually asking if attribution plays a role in the distinction between plagiarism and quotation?
(Also of course the art works were different in the same way that a Warhol Brillo box is different from a non-Warhol Brillo box, so you have to be rather careful with you comparisons, which you really are not.)
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But that's not plagiarism, because she is clearly crediting sources (there is obviously an expectation that the viewer know she is being unoriginal.)
(See difference between `quotation' and `plagiarism'; originality is not the only important issue here.)
ETA: and also the art work as an intentional object, see Danto & Brillo boxes and such.