Plagiarism

My interest in plagiarism and copyright infringement began a couple of years ago when I learned that artists were losing their jobs to artificial intelligence. Then, a book review in the March 30, 2026, The New Yorker magazine intensified my interest. In “Copy That”, Anthony Lane wrote, “One of the knottiest problems in this vexing new field of endeavor concerns the relationship between A.I. and plagiarism. It could be argued that the two are nearly identical, given that artificial intelligence scrapes up immeasurably vast amounts of online data, like those trollers that scour the seabed for shrimp and flat fish with weighted nets, and to hell with the natural habitat.” What a metaphor!

Lane’s reference to Judge Richard A. Posner’s The Little Book of Plagiarism (2007) prompted my purchase of a secondhand copy. My curiosity became an obsession when I wrestled with his linguistic gymnastics. After reading this little book once and discovering its underlying structure, I read it again, integrating the information in each chapter with the chapters that preceded it—building an argument. It helped to have had experience with people like I imagined the judge’s persona to be. I’ve met people who know topics inside and out and love to weave their expertise into intricate patterns meant to awe as much as educate. I took written notes.

Plagiarism seems to depend upon context yet does involve “nonconsensual fraudulent copying”. (p. 33) Plagiarism of copyrighted material is a legal issue. However, copyright law doesn’t cover everything, for example book titles. It doesn’t always cover ideas either. Copying something verbatim, or visually as in the case of Rogers v Koons (1992), without quotation marks and attribution is copyright infringement. Copying an idea may be plagiarism but not automatically also copyright infringement; in other words, it may be a moral but not a legal dispute. I’m not a lawyer. I’m just trying to understand.

And so I paused to examine a Facebook post mid-April in which a local author shared a photo of her new book. Because I blog about children’s picture books, this title rang a bell. Why did her story idea sound so familiar? Ah, there it was, posted December 20, 2025, What Teachers Can’t Do by Douglas Wood (2002). Copyright infringement? Unlikely. Plagiarism? I’d have to read the new story and compare it to the one written about dinosaurs fourteen years ago. I’ll be on the lookout for both books as I continue my hunt for treasure at library sales.