Which is Worse -- Sharing With Attribution, Or Plagiarism Without?

end of last year, we wrote about the case of zu Guttenberg, Karl-Theodor, former Federal Minister of Defence of Germany, who lost his job and his doctorate when he was found to have plagiarized parts of his thesis. Now, the journal Science reports of another possible case:

German Education and Research Annette Schavan faces charges she plagiarized part of his doctoral thesis, published in 1980. A website called schavanplag (in German) identified 56 incidents where anonymous accuser said Schavan phrasing copied incorrectly cited sources.

That alone might not be as important, if not for the fact that there have been at least two recent cases of plagiarism by German politicians - Silvana Koch -Mehrin, in June last year, and Chatzimarkakis a month later.

Now, I do not know exactly what the positions of all German politicians were online file sharing unauthorized, but somehow I doubt that any of them approved. And yet do not seem to have had no qualms about copying the work of others and passing it off as their own.

Beyond the double standards involved, there is another important point to make here, I think. Plagiarism is the creators of negate their rightful attribution. When people share files online, however, there is no attempt to go through his own work - the allocation is always conserved, because if people do not know what you are downloading.

This is probably why sometimes share online can increase sales of the works in question: it is a way to report something you enjoy - and a personal recommendation is perhaps the form the most powerful marketing around. Plagiarism, however, is a deliberate attempt to enhance his own reputation to deprive others of the recognition of being, with all that this implies for prices lost.

So what is worse? And what should be more concerned with German politicians?

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