What is now beyond dispute about Del Castillo’s actions? Whole paragraphs and arguments—from across all three sources—were found verbatim in a decision he penned, without attributions. More than 20 passages were confirmed written not by Del Castillo’s hand. His excuse? That his legal researcher accidentally erased two citations in the footnotes. - INQUIRER.
Editorial
Open season
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:58:00 10/23/2010
MANILA, Philippines—Let’s say someone, for whatever reason, takes someone else’s child and spirits him away to another place without notifying the parents. When the child is finally found, the offender is charged with kidnapping. He loudly contests the charge. Not guilty, he says. He merely wanted to show the child the Ferris wheel. Let him ride the swing. Walk on the beach. He had no malicious intent when he took the child.
How do you react to such a defense? You drag the kidnapper to jail. And, for good measure, make sure he rots there. When he took possession of the child without the parents’ consent, whatever motive he had—and however laudatory he might think it was—would have no bearing on the criminal nature of the act itself. Malicious intent? In an open-and-shut kidnapping case, the concept would not even merit mention.
Now, how about kidnapping words and ideas? Like using someone else’s written work and passing it off as one’s own, totally without attribution? Not a teeny line or one innocuous phrase, but whole paragraphs—and from not one, but three different, separate sources? What if the offending party defends his larcenous action as completely aboveboard because it lacks “malicious intent” or is not “tainted with fraud, corruption or malice”?
The Supreme Court of the Philippines introduced that phraseology into the straightforward case of Associate Justice Mariano C. del Castillo who was accused of plagiarism for having copied verbatim, from undisclosed sources, extensive portions of the majority decision he wrote in the case of Vinuya v. Executive Secretary.
Parts of the ruling were found to have been a compendium of passages lifted from three sources: “A Fiduciary Theory of Jus Cogens” by Evan Criddle and Evan Fox-Descent, “Breaking the Silence: Rape as an International Crime” by Mark Ellis, and “Enforcing Erga Omnes Obligations in International Law” by Christian Tams.
Relating this sorry incident to the moral and legal quandaries presented by the crime of actual kidnapping is not as farfetched as it may sound. “Plagiarism,” after all, comes from the Latin word that literally means “kidnapping”—“plagiarius.” To plagiarize another person’s thoughts, expressions, ideas or creative work and pass it off as one’s own is, in effect, kidnapping in a different guise. And where the proof lies in the simple act of comparing the two works in question side by side—word for word and line by line—and concluding from there that one had indeed copied from the other, “malicious intent,” whatever it is in this case, would not even be a question.
What is now beyond dispute about Del Castillo’s actions? Whole paragraphs and arguments—from across all three sources—were found verbatim in a decision he penned, without attributions. More than 20 passages were confirmed written not by Del Castillo’s hand. His excuse? That his legal researcher accidentally erased two citations in the footnotes.
This defense, so laughable in its crudeness yet so contemptible in its presumption that sensible people would easily see through it, was amazingly accepted by 10 of the eminent justices of the Supreme Court. They absolved Del Castillo of wrongdoing, attributed the scandalous incident to the clumsiness of an underling it conveniently refused to name or punish, and then—the icing on the cake—tacked on the supposed lack of “malicious intent” on Del Castillo’s part as the definitive proof of his innocence.
Students into cheating must now be cheering the Supreme Court’s dazzling wisdom. Anytime they are caught plagiarizing, they have recourse to a brand-new and sturdy defense: they merely forgot a footnote or two. See, no malicious intent. Hey, it worked for a justice of the Supreme Court. Why not for them?
In a blistering dissenting opinion, Associate Justice Lourdes Sereno decried the majority decision as having “created unimaginable problems for Philippine academia, which will from now on have to find a disciplinary response to plagiarism committed by students and researchers...”
The ruling, in effect, enshrines kidnapping—“plagiarius”—as henceforth permissible when it comes to intellectual property. It declares nothing less than an open season on the work of every thinking, writing, creating person in the world.
see:
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/editorial/view/20101023-299224/Open-season
