When does copying text become plagiarism?

March 5, 2010 by Edmund Gall

Ever since attending primary school, I've been aware that copying someone's work was wrong.  At college - high school in North American parlance - I learnt about plagiarism.  I was reminded about it in university when compiling research and some months ago it was played out in T&T's political and press arenas with the accusation of plagiarism by a newpaper columnist / priest / potential Integrity Commission member.

Related to this, I learnt about attribution - if you're going to use someone's work in yours, then you need to highlight what you used, where you got it from and whose work it was.  In research, this is done through referencing.  In websites, you may use a copyright signature and embed a link to the original work.

I'm wondering what's the standard in T&T's media houses.  Sometimes, articles would have the writer's name in the byline, and sometimes they won't.  I always presumed that if no name was attached to an article, then it was written by some junior member of the media house's staff.  However, if an article was copied from another media house, then appropriate attribution was expected.

Today I offer two curious examples from T&T's daily papers' websites, both involving cricket.

Being the sucker for punishment I am, I went looking for articles reviewing the West Indies men's cricket team's latest defeat - yesterday's loss to Zimbabwe in a One-Day International in Guyana. The Trinidad Guardian published a report today on their website - 'Zimbabwe hold nerve for 2-run win'.  There was no writer or byline, so I presumed it was written by a junior Guardian writer.  Instead, I found the same article, word for word with some adjustment in paragraphing and including the article's misspelling of Shivnarine Chanderpaul's first name, on the Cricinfo.com website.  The article was written by Siddarth Ravindran, a sub-editor at Cricinfo.  Why didn't the Guardian attribute the story to Mr Ravindran and/or Cricinfo.com?

Similarly, the Trinidad Express published an article on their website - 'Gayle chides batting trio after stinging defeat'.  In this case, the Express attributed the article to the CMC, a Caribbean media house.  However, this story closely matched one written on Cricinfo.com - 'Gayle hauls up batting trio'.  The Express version was shorter, but the flow and ideas were clearly from the Cricinfo.com article.  The Cricinfo.com article was attributed to 'Cricinfo staff', so we don't know if the person who wrote it also works for CMC.  However, nowhere in the CMC/Express article does it even refer to Cricinfo.com.  If I were to do a similar level of re-writing at university, I'd be accused of plagiarism.

So I guess I'm wondering: when does copying become plagiarism in the media?  Does the media operate with the same standards as research organisations, e.g. universities?  Or does the media worldwide allow others to take their story, jiggle a few words and re-publish it without attribution being necessary?  Do different standards apply on the Internet versus print media?

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