The following quotation comes from an article titled “Plagiarism, Norms, and the Limits of Theft Law: Some Observations on the Use of Criminal Sanctions in Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights,” which was written by Stuart P. Green and published in Hastings Law Journal, Volume 54, Number 1, November 2002. In today’s quote, Professor Green offers a few reasons why people plagiarize. (I have included the original footnotes to demonstrate proper citation as opposed to covenantal attribution.)

I suspect that Pastor Douglas Wilson of Christ Church, Moscow, does not fall into any of the categories listed below. Rather, I believe Mr. Wilson thinks all things belong to him in a “right of the first night” sort of way. He “neither fears God nor regards man” (Luke 18:2). Lawlessness animates him. This accounts for his serial plagiarism and it explains why he labored to unleash Steven Sitler & Jamin Wight against Kirk & community. He’s the kind of person who will steal from you with one hand as he asks you to blurb his book with the other. He’s the kind of person who will look at an image of two pages from two books (one of them his) set side by side with large swaths of plagiarized text highlighted in yellow, and say, “That’s not plagiarism.” I think he loves to steal and I think he loves to deceive his way out of it, if & when he’s caught. And if you disagree, please show me one instance where, after someone caught him plagiarizing, he didn’t resort to deception rather than own his sin. I will give you the front page.

Here is Professor Green:

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Plagiarism, Norms, and the Limits of Theft Law:

Some Observations on the Use of Criminal Sanctions in Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights

by STUART P. GREEN*

E. The Psychology of Plagiarism
Why do people plagiarize, and how does plagiarism feel to the plagiarist and to his victims? If the Ambrose and Goodwin cases are any indication, it would appear that a good deal of plagiarism is inadvertent. Indeed, psychologists have described a particular psychological condition — dubbed “cryptomnesia” — in which people mistakenly believe that they have produced a new idea when they have actually retrieved an old one from memory.⁷⁰ Other plagiarists act out of a deeper and more complex set of psychological motives. Peter Shaw observes an identifiable pattern: The plagiarist is talented in his own right and has no need to steal.⁷¹ He leaves clues that are easy to detect and is frequently a repeat offender. He acts out of an unconscious desire to be caught, rather like a kleptomaniac. Secretly, he intends to cause his own destruction.⁷² (Perhaps it was demons like these that drove David Sumner to pass off Neal Bowers’s poems as his own.)

In some cases, the plagiarist might engage in an elaborate form of self-deception. In Terence Blacker’s novel, Kill Your Darlings, for example, an aging creative writing teacher named Gregory Keays turns to plagiarism when one of his students, Peter Gibson, dies and leaves behind an untraceable manuscript of obvious brilliance.⁷³ Blacker describes Gregory’s process of rationalization: Although he is copying Peter’s work practically verbatim, Gregory deceives himself into believing that it is merely a source of “research,” a kind of “rough ore.”⁷⁴ He becomes “aware of a new energy, a sense of direction that [he] had all but forgotten was within [his] gift.”⁷⁵ He convinces himself that he is merely “reordering, compressing, honing, expanding, bringing life to the dry, arid path of [Peter’s] narrative with [his] own dashes of colour.”⁷⁶ In the end, Gregory believes that he has somehow transformed Peter’s words into his own.

A similar plot line unfolds in John Colapinto’s engaging novel, About the Author.⁷⁷ Colapinto’s protagonist, Cal Cunningham, is a hapless bookstore clerk who has always fantasized about being a novelist, but never manages to write anything. When his roommate Stewart Church dies in mysterious circumstances, Cal decides to publish Stewart’s just completed novel (also brilliant, also apparently untraceable) under his own name. While retyping the novel (which, in fact, does contain descriptions of many of Cal’s own exploits), Cal explains, “I felt convinced that I truly was the author of the freshly minted typescript that lay on my desk. Stewart’s specter, which had seemed to hover in the shadows above my pecking keys, was finally gone. Gone!”⁷⁸ Like Blacker’s Gregory Keays, Colapinto’s Cal Cunningham manages to convince himself — at least for the moment — that the work he is plagiarizing is really his own.

Finally, there is undoubtedly a significant amount of plagiarism that is conscious and deliberate, the result of rational, if perverse, cost-benefit calculation. A desperate student knows that he will not pass a particular course unless he produces an acceptable term paper. He is too short of time, imagination, or initiative to create a work of his own, so he buys a pre-written term paper from an Internet “cheat site”⁷⁹ and puts his name on it, or copies substantial passages from a book he finds in the library and fails to credit it. He weighs the likelihood that he will be caught, and the penalty that would be imposed, against the benefit of passing a course or obtaining a degree with minimal effort. His psychology is similar to a thief who obtains money or goods from others by theft or fraud, rather than by earning an honest living.

* Professor of Law, Louisiana State University; Fulbright Distinguished Scholar to the United Kingdom, University of Glasgow School of Law (2002–03). One can hardly begin to write about plagiarism without experiencing a heightened awareness of one’s intellectual debts. In addition to all of the authorities cited in the notes below, I would also like to express my thanks to Mike Carroll, Bill Corbett, Daniel Gervais, Stephen Higginson, Craig Joyce, Jason Kilborn, Michael Landau, Mark Lemley, Paul Marcus, Gerry Moohr, Catherine Rogers, and Lloyd Weinreb for their help on earlier drafts; and to Lohr Miller and Victor Mukete for their research assistance. My title “echoes” that of Sanford H. Kadish’s influential article, Some Observations on the Use of Criminal Sanctions in Enforcing Economic Regulations, 30 U. CHI. L. REV. 423 (1963). To all of my sources I give credit (but none of the blame) for this work.

⁷⁰ Martin L. Bink et al., The Credibility of a Source Influences the Rate of Unconscious Plagiarism, 7 MEMORY 293 (1999); Alan S. Brown & Hildy E. Halliday, Cryptomnesia and Source Memory Difficulties, 104 AM. J. PSYCH. 475, 475–76 (1991); C. Neil Macrae et al., Contexts of Cryptomnesia: May the Source Be With You, 17 SOC. COGNITION 273 (1999); Patricia L. Tenpenny, Can Plagiarism Occur Inadvertently?, 30 BULL. OF THE PSYCHONOMIC SOC. 456 (1992).
⁷¹ Peter Shaw, Plagiary, 51 AM. SCHOLAR 325, 332 (1982).
⁷² Id. at 329–32.
⁷³ TERENCE BLACKER, KILL YOUR DARLINGS 154–59 (2000).
⁷⁴ Id. at 158.
⁷⁵ Id.
⁷⁶ Id.
⁷⁷ JOHN COLAPINTO, ABOUT THE AUTHOR (2001).
⁷⁸ Id. at 40 (emphasis in original).
⁷⁹ See infra note 114.

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