Have you been following the Jonah Lehrer self-plagiarism flap? Here’s a backgrounder.
At a superficial level this is an absurdity. Recycling an idea is good if it speeds up the spread of the idea. Plagiarism is an offense only if it harms the original creator. If Jonah Lehrer is the original creator then whatever harm he is causing himself (i.e. none) he fully internalizes. No exernalities here, move on. You get the sense that journalists are mindlessly misapplying a norm they apparently don’t fully understand.
But at a level deeper, Jonah Lehrer’s self-plagiarism is basically the same as plagiarism. Because he recycled material he wrote for one publisher into new material written for a different publisher. The original publisher had a role in the creative process. They selected Jonah Lehrer as an author, they edited and ultimately approved his work. They invested in it. The new publisher probably has an implicit agreement with other publishers not to infringe on their creative output. Because Jonah Lehrer did not inform the new publisher of his self-plagiarism he led them to violate that agreement.
But let’s go the final level deeper. When we recognize the equivalence what we really should conclude is that policing plagiarism is just as absurd as policing self-plagiarism. Ideas are useless if they are not spread and the value of an idea is independent of who created it. To put a halt to the spread of an idea just because of a dispute about somebody’s long-ago sunk cost is a pure social waste.
Cheap Talk 
6 comments
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June 24, 2012 at 11:21 pm
Lones Smith
Haven’t you said this before?
June 24, 2012 at 11:35 pm
jeff
you caught me
June 25, 2012 at 6:50 am
Anonymous
I think there have been posts which have been “reposts” before also. But nobody should mind – they are all good (n+1)th time.
June 25, 2012 at 8:35 am
Angry Dude
I was with you until your last level of deepness.
People are motivated differently, but idea people are often motivated by recognition. Absent a prohibition on plagiarism, we can be sure that some other defense mechanism will come into play.
This new mechanism will likely be less optimal at the spread of ideas. E.g., create enclaves, skew reports to describe outcomes but cryptically hide methods, etc.
Think carefully. Even the “open source” software community has evolved a self-enforcing high form of anti-plagiarism. Hard to imagine an industry such as this ithout it.
June 25, 2012 at 9:49 am
Jonathan Weinstein
I don’t think anyone is saying he couldn’t express the same idea twice, and even using the same phrasing would have been fine if he had just properly attributed it to his earlier work. This is at worst a misdemeanor but I do think the standard should be that you mention the material has appeared before.
Of course, context is everything. If you copy the “Notation” section from one game theory paper to another, I would think you are all right. Many people’s introductions sound very similar in paper after paper in the same area and I don’t think anyone complains about that either. It’s really hard to make a blanket rule except probably “Don’t profit by fooling people.”
June 25, 2012 at 10:04 pm
Jonah Lehrer Turns 31 | The Moderate Voice
[…] Jeff at Cheap Talk: Recycling an idea is good if it speeds up the spread of the idea. Plagiarism is an offense only if it harms the original creator. If Jonah Lehrer is the original creator then whatever harm he is causing himself (i.e. none) he fully internalizes. No exernalities here, move on. You get the sense that journalists are mindlessly misapplying a norm they apparently don’t fully understand. … […]