Leadership in plagiarism

Nowadays it is so easy to search and retrieve information from the internet. Any primary school children can submit pages of assignment within a day or two. If the little kid can do wonders with the click of the mouse, imagine what the adults can do. Just googled or wikipaediaed, wallah, all the information will be there - to be cut and paste!

Plagiarism is a non-entity and respect for intellectual property seems only exist in the past. Even if the information is easily available, it will be a courtesy to at least acknowledge the source or author of the article or references used.

Recently I received a forwarded email from a friend with an attached short article. The original writer of the article was actually me but in the email, the writer's name of the article has been changed to another person. It seems this plagiarist has been doing this sort notorious act of article hijacking for sometime already.

I told my friend this is not the first time my writings has been plagiarised. Sometimes copycat is the highest level of flattery. Frankly, I am getting used to it. But then sometimes plagiarism can be very notorious and makes us dumbfounded when we found out the background of the person who did it. There was one case which was actually very shocking and sad for me at the same time.

Some years ago I wrote and presented a paper for an international leadership training program for youth leaders. The paper was distributed to all participants and soft copies were available freely to all who wants to download it. I was not sure how many people downloaded the file but certainly there are people who did it.

Fast forward to a couple of years later where I was sitting attentively in a convention room in downtown Tokyo. I was attending an international seminar for Buddhist leaders. As one speaker after another presented their paper, I was enjoying the sharing of intellectual discourse from different continents. Then it's the turn of a speaker from the same country of origin as me to present his paper. As he presented eloquently line by line, it comes to a point where I felt very familiar with the text projected on the screen. Those points were written by me! Word by word. Line by line.

I was flabagasted!

I should be proud of myself since someone who is the president of a national level organisation was unashamedly presenting his "view" using exactly the text which I presented earlier.

At the end of his presentation there were applauses throughout the hall and the speaker basked in the atmosphere. But one thing was clearly missing. Throughout his presentation, he never once mentioned that he uses somebody else's points as his!

Usually I would have taken this lightly and forgets about it. But the problem lies in that was a conference for Buddhists and I think all speakers are Buddhists who should know plagiarism is also one type of stealing which is tantamount to breaking one of the Buddhist precepts. Or maybe the plagiarist concerned knows it was plagiarism but do not think he was breaking the precept by stealing intellectual property of others.

I dread to think what will be the direction and future of the organisation the plagiarist leads. I only can wish all the best to the organisation members. - Loka