Edwards thievery: their closest relations are European ferrets and Siberian polecats. Researchers theorize that polecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska, to establish the New World population.

Paul Tome original: Their closest relatives are European ferrets and Siberian polecats. Researchers theorize polecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska to establish the New World population

what’s wrong with people these days?

when I was growing up the idea of plagarism was a Bad Thing – now it’s acceptable?

What’s Going On???

:(

Then again, maybe it’s because I volunteered to review a Cassie Edwards book for Paperback Reader, reasoning that a.) I’ve never actually read one and I want to form my own opinion, and b) I’m insane.

The ferret aspect, well, I don’t know about the common knowledge aspect there. If you are doing research and get close to paraphrasing, you need to just rewrite and then give credit where credit is due at the end of the book or in the acknowledgements.

I teach freshman composition at a community college, and you would not beleive what we go through in terms of students stealing off the internet. I can pretty much put in a phrase and poof! there is the essay it came from. I think that if our authors are doing it, we are doomed.

Jessica

I guess by the fact that you’re still posting, that she has not managed to drag your name through the mud. For that, I’ll be eternally grateful to her. Stay funny ;)

In the first post on this matter, Candy said they had emailed the same information to The Penguin Group and to Dorchester.

Of course, I don't know the legal ramifications about using information from the internet, but I thought a writer had to give credit to sources used when directly quoting and such.

Although the SB site is down right now, IIRC most of the sources were published books, including one by Charles Bird Grinnell, who is quite famous. In fact, anyone in Native American studies would recognize most if not all of those sources (Candy, Sarah, and Candy’s friend Kate found the references in Google books, I think). In any case, there should always be attribution to avoid a charge of plagiarism, but even with attribution one cannot simply quote or paraphrase without AT LEAST specific attribution like a footnote or endnote (specific to the passage) and, in the case of a direct quote, quotation marks. Close paraphrasing can still be plagiarism, however. Although plagiarism itself, as Jane pointed out, is not a legal concept or term and has no legal implications in and of itself. If, however, someone uses unattributed work, which has a registered copyright, then there is the potential for a claim and a case of copyright infringement, which, as Jane pointed out, doesn’t require any conscious intent to prove (that is, if you copy work that has been copyrighted and registered, it’s infringement, whether you meant to or not).

On a side note, am I the only one who can’t see any of the block quote formatting in these comments?

Okay, my question is who would have wanted to buy this book only to get a lecture on the origins of black-footed ferrets?

Particularly when you can read it online for free, right?

But has anyone alerted the publisher in question? Seems like something a publisher might like to know.

~~Becka