Language Log

The plagiarism circus has added second and third rings, and a sideshow.

"The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Work", NYT 12/27/2023: The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies. The Times is the first major […]

My reaction to the current controversy over Claudine Gay's alleged plagiarisms is to observe again that the relevant policies are a tangled and incoherent mess. I first wrote about this back in 2006 — and  as it happens, that post compared the work of a different university president with the treatment of a Harvard undergraduate […]

Jialing Xie surveys the field in "Top 10 Buzzwords in Chinese Online Media: An overview of China’s media top buzzwords over the past year", What's on Weibo (1/5/20).  As in the previous year, the expressions were chosen by the chief editor of the magazine Yǎowén Jiáozì 咬文嚼字, which Xie says "literally means 'to pay excessive […]

The Trump campaign officially maintains that there was no plagiarism in Melania Trump's speech at the Republican convention. Campaign chairman Paul Manafort was astonishingly disingenuous: "These were common words and values"; "To think that she'd be cribbing Michelle Obama's words is crazy"; "There's no cribbing. What she did was use words that are common words"; […]

Jim Romenesko, "Brent Bozell urges liberal media to 'tell the truth,' while he fibs about writing a column", 2/13/2014: The conservative Media Research Center often urges liberal news outlets to TELL THE TRUTH, but the Reston, VA-based press watchdog isn’t telling the truth about its own leader: Brent Bozell doesn’t write the syndicated column that […]

Dylan Byers, "Bush speechwriter: Obama plagiarized Bush", Politico 1/29/2014: President George W. Bush's former speech writer said that President Barack Obama plagiarized his former boss in Tuesday's State of the Union address. Speaking to Fox News's Megyn Kelly, Marc Thiessen, the lead writer on Bush's 2007 State of the Union address, said he found Obama's […]

Rand Paul is  in the throes of a plagiarism scandal. (For details, see e.g. Juliet Lapidos, "Rand Paul's Plagiarism", NYT 11/5/2013.)  But in my opinion, much of the commentary on this imbroglio misses the point so badly as to veer into falsehood, at least by implication. Thus Rebecca Kaplan, "More evidence emerges of plagiarism in Rand […]

John McIntyre, at You Don't Say, has some cogent remarks on self-plagiarism: Yesterday, writing at Poynter.org, Roy Peter Clark suggested that our current attitudes about plagiarism have conflated relatively minor or innocuous literary borrowings with serious thefts. One of the points he identified was the clamor about self-plagiarism. After quoting him, I'd like to add […]

The latest plagiarism scandal involves the now former German defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who resigned due to allegations that he had plagiarized much of his doctoral dissertation. The scandal itself is of no particular interest, but it has inspired some really pretty and informative visualization. The "barcode" shows the fraction of pages on which […]

The Court of Appeal for British Columbia handed down a very unusual decision today that raises an interesting linguistic issue. The underlying case, Cojocaru (Guardian Ad Litem) v. British Columbia Women’s Hospital, was a medical negligence suit by the parents of a brain-damaged baby against the hospital at which it was born. At trial before […]

"Canada PM faces plagiarism claim", says the BBC. And indeed some copying certainly occurred — in addition to comparing the texts, the story juxtaposes and then overlays video of a speech made by Australian PM John Howard on March 18, 2003, with video of a speech made by Canadian politician (and now PM) Stephen Harper. […]

As linguistic metaphors go, I thought Surya Prakash chose very well for the title of his op-ed piece in The Daily Pioneer in India, which concerned the way in which bygone sins of American politicians rise up to blight their hopes and make them anxious about their prospects. He called it "Past imperfect, future tense." […]