I'm Steve Ember with IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English.
This is the opening weekend for the movie version of “The Da Vinci Code".The
mystery about art, religion and murder is based on the book by Dan Brown. The
latest reports say his three-year-old book has already sold sixty million copies
worldwide.
It also led to a trial earlier this year in Britain. Two writers accused Dan
Brown of plagiarism -- stealing someone else's words or ideas. They said he
copied the main idea of their book "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail."
A High Court judge in London did not agree. He said the idea was too general
to be considered protected under British copyright laws.
Recently a number of stories involving accusations of plagiarism have been in the news.
Kaavya
Viswanathan, a 19-year-old student at Harvard University, lost a major book
deal. It appeared she copied from five other writers in parts of her book, “How
Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life." Her publisher, Little, Brown
& Company, finally withdrew the young-adult novel from sale.
Earlier, she told the New York Times that some of the plagiarism may have
happened because she remembers what she reads. "I really thought the words were
my own," she said.
Another situation involved the chief of Raytheon, a leading defense company.
William Swanson wrote a small, unpublished work called “Swanson’s Unwritten Laws
of Management." The company offered it free to anyone interested.
But some of it came from material that did not receive credit, including
a 1944 book, "The Unwritten Laws of Engineering."
Mr. Swanson apologized. He said he meant the advice as an expression of old
rules, but in terms of his own experience over the years. Raytheon directors
took action to punish him with about one million dollars in lost pay. Mr.
Swanson earned seven million dollars last year.
Plagiarism has always been an issue in schools. Teachers say the Internet has
made it much easier to find and copy material. But teachers have their ways to
use the Internet to catch plagiarism.
Turnitin, for example, is a Web site that offers a service to identify papers
that contain copied material. It says a common mistake is to believe that
electronic material is not private property in the same way books are.
Punishments for plagiarism differ in schools. A high school student might
fail the project. A college student might fail the class and be suspended for a
year. In some colleges and universities, a student or professor caught
plagiarizing might be told to leave and never return.
Using information from experts is usually OK, as long as where the material
came from is identified. Any material copied word-for-word is supposed to appear
inside quotation marks. Where people get in trouble is when they try to claim
other people's words as their own.
IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English was written by Nancy Steinbach. I’m Steve
Ember.
plagiarism : the act of using and passing
off as one's own (the ideas or writings of another)（剽竊行為；動詞形式：plagiarize）
（來源：VOA 英語點津姍姍編輯）
