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On Copyright and Plagiarism
This article appeared in Innerface three years ago. It is re-printed because of the importance of views and concepts expressed therein:--
At the conclusion of the Foreword to The Urantia Book, the Revelators tell us that more than 1000 of the highest human concepts have been collated in producing the first part of the book and, for Part 4, thought gems and superior concepts have been assembled from more than 2000 human beings who lived on Earth from the days of Jesus down to the time of editing these revelations--more correctly restatements.
Nowhere in the book have these humans been named in order to acknowledge their contributions and, in many instances, what are known to have been quotations derived directly from human sources have not been identified with quotation marks. The author of a recently published critique of The Urantia Book names this as shameless plagiarism.
An interesting article on the pro's and con's of private and public ownership of knowledge has appeared on the Internet Information Highway and has been summarized by Urantia Book reader, Dr Matt Neibaur. The Internet article was entitled Speculations on the History of Ownership of Oral, Typographic, and Electronic Knowledge by Doug Brent who suggests as follows:
Ownership of Oral Knowledge
In primary oral culture that has never known literacy, knowledge is not owned; rather it is performed. Without print, knowledge must be stored, not as an abstract set of ideas, but as a set of concepts embedded deeply in the language and culture of the people. Strictly procedural knowledge--how to build a boat, how to fight a war--is passed on directly from craftsman to craftsman through the process of apprenticeship. However, the more abstract knowledge of the tribe--not just their history but also their values, their concepts of justice and social order--is contained in the epic formula, recurrent themes, and mythic patterns and plots out of which the story-tellers of the tribe weave their narratives. This knowledge exists in a pre-existing network of interconnected, extraordinarily complex, and non-linear ways, all of which is known, at least in outline, to the storyteller's audience even before he begins. In such cultures, knowledge was held as common property, entrusted to tellers of tales who were maintained by the tribe, not for their individual contribution to the growth of ideas, but for their ongoing duty to keep knowledge alive by performing it. Thus there was no such thing as ownership of knowledge--or, more aptly, there was no such thing as private ownership of knowledge.
Ownership of Knowledge in Literate Societies
With the introduction of writing, all of this changed. According to Ong (1982) and his anthropological school of communications history, writing had a number of profound effects, including the development of the self-conscious, rational self and the power of abstraction, and, as a further consequence, the entire Western system of logic. It also had the important result of separating text from performer and knowledge from knower, thereby creating a fossilized text that can achieve an independent existence quite apart from its knower.
If knowledge can be separated from knower, it can be owned by individuals. In an oral society, plagiarism is unthinkable, simply because the survival of the culture depends on plagiarism. As the manuscript society came into existence, it became common to attribute written tales to their sources in prior texts. Appropriating another's ideas, once an essential means of keeping the ideas alive, now became the act of a plagiarius, a plunderer of what rightly belonged to another. Typography made the written word a commodity. The communal oral world split into privately claimed freeholdings.
Copyright was originally created more as a means of breaking the stationer's monopoly on texts rather than as a means of protecting authors' rights. But by the 18th century, copyright had become firmly established, not only as a means to ensure that an author would be paid for his ideas, but also to ensure that he would have the right to protect their integrity by granting him the sole authority to correct, amend, or retract them.
The modern abhorrence of plagiarism does not mean that one should not use another's ideas. The practice of bringing ideas forward and integrating them into later works is fundamental to the modern belief that knowledge is cumulative and improvable. However, a crucial difference from the oral tradition is that, as knowledge diffuses through knowledge networks of research disciplines, it leaves behind the tracks of its passage in the form of citations.
The effects of printed text is somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand, the explicit pointers to earlier text reinforce the fact that knowledge is built communally through the interaction of thousands of individuals. On the other hand, the fact that each idea can, theoretically, be labeled with the name of its contributor has created the romantic myth of the individual creative genius--in the arts as the figure of the brooding artist creating in solitude, in the sciences as the individual inventor, the Nobel prize winner who sees what no one has seen before.
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