Plagiarism – does it matter?

The government is having some fun today with the accusation that Mark Latham plagiarised a Bill Clinton speech.

“This really illustrates …, as I said earlier, that the Latham ideas are essentially generated by internet search engines” Peter Costello told the media.

But if you can find good ideas on the internet, should it matter where they come from? It’s not as if Bill Clinton’s speech was intellectual property that he wanted to protect. To the contrary, he would want its ideas spread as widely as possible – even, perhaps, to Australia.

When periodic plagiarism scandals hit newspapers, after a journalist has lifted copy from elsewhere, exposure on Media Watch and the sack are likely consequences. Yet from the reader’s point of view, which matters more – originality and sourcing or accuracy? I’ll forget most by-lines before I finish reading the article, but will be very annoyed by a factual error. Yet the error will result in a ‘we were wrong’ at most.

This leaves personal integrity issues, especially as Latham has humiliated someone else for plagiarism in the past. But was he using anything from the Clinton speech to make himself look smart, original or witty? From the extracts from the two speeches in the newspapers, the ideas and language are what you would expect of any education-oriented social democrat since the mid-1990s.

Yes, sure, it is better to be original, and if you can’t to acknowledge your sources. But Latham’s offence is at most very trivial.