This post was written for my Bibliography & Research in Music (MUTH 65200) course at Ithaca College. I will be posting eight reflections from the class here throughout the course of the semester. You can find the other posts under the category Bib Class Reflections.

Our readings this week all deal with the subject of plagiarism. If I had to summarize their main points, I would do so in the following sentences…

• Give credit for the words and ideas of others
• While what constitutes plagiarism can be confusing, especially for students, we need to pause and thoroughly question before we submit our work for review
• When in doubt — cite!
• The idea of being a contemporary writer is making your way through this morass of information

This is all common knowledge, right?

Well the trouble is that I’ve already plagiarized. I lifted those sentences word for word from the sources (and related sources) given to us to read this week. Had I published this blog post as a helpful list without citing sources, I would face legally jeopardy.

The first sentence, “Give credit for the words and ideas of others,” was stollen from Laurie J. Sampsel’s book  Music Research: A Handbook. The sixteenth chapter, “Style Manuals and Citation of Sources,” gives a general overview of what plagiarism is, and lists potential consequences for doing so. She also includes helpful examples of plagiarism paired with proper citations. In doing so (especially with original sources so close to our research topics) the contrast of legal and illegal representations of others’ ideas is stark.

The second sentence, “While what constitutes plagiarism can be confusing, especially for students, we need to pause and thoroughly question before we submit our work for review,” was lifted from Dr. Crystal Sands. Published on the Excelsior College Experts Blog, the article “It’s Complicated: Plagiarism In Our Culture” speaks to the trouble teachers face in teaching and calling out plagiarism in the classroom. Dr. Sands cites confusing rules, mixed cultural signals, and double standards for professors as barriers to student learning on this issue. She optimistically points out that students who question and self-doubt are usually on the right track (yay).

“When in doubt — cite!” comes directly from Ithaca College’s own guide on plagiarism which is linked in the quiz we were asked to take for this post. The guide presents similar information as Sampsel’s chapter with little blurbs on common knowledge, quotation, paraphrasing and citing. Especially after reading the first three sources, I found the quiz to be quite easy. However, it was interesting to look at the IC guide and quiz through the lens of Dr. Sands’s article. It is obviously an attempt to help students navigate the complicated role crediting and plagiarizing plays in our culture. I’m curious who worked on this guide, and how often it is used. How many professors use it with their classes, and how many students would credit this guide/quiz with fundamentally changing their ability to write well cited papers?

The final source was the provocative one. From Brooke Gladstone’s interview with Kenneth Goldsmith, MoMA’s poet laureate, I pulled the sentence, “The idea of being a contemporary writer is making your way through this morass of information.” Goldsmith goes on to say, “There’s so much information out there already, that really one need not create any more.”

Goldsmith makes the argument that literature is in a rut because it is binding itself to the idea of originality, and resists the inevitability of imitation. He says we need to train ourselves to ‘point,’ because pointing–not making– is where creative artistry now happens in the digital age. To hone his students’ craft of pointing, Goldsmith assigns a term paper in which they can only present a paper they purchased from an online mill and must defend in class.

He claims (rightfully, in my opinion) that music transcended the problem of intellectual property decades ago. As musicians, I think we have seen our thinking about quoting, sampling, and sharing develop over time. The fundamental nature of our art as formless (only to be caught on recordings or represented as symbols) allows for freedom of ownership. Each day we spend time, knees deep, in the notes, aesthetic, forms, and emotions of composers long dead. We play on instruments that have had countless owners and whose construction is the result of shared (stollen?) mechanical craftsmanship. We take lessons with professors who are just passing on the information they learned from dozens of teachers, who in turn learned from dozens of teachers. Pure music seems to resist ownership.

Thinking about the idea of property — as Gladstone does at the end of the WNYC publication — I subscribe to the notion that it is fluid, even beyond music.

Perhaps it is my time spent pursuing musicianship, or living in a residential co-op where meals and furniture and work is shared. Or maybe it’s my time spent in zazen on Sunday mornings where the cultural paradigm of “I” or “self” is consciously subverted. But the more we enter a digital world, where copying and pasting can be performed on a whim, the more that world starts to reflect the boundless, ever evolving natural world we actually live in.

I have no more ownership over the the thoughts presented in this blog post than I do over the tree in our backyard. Mozart has no more claim to the Requiem than the United States of America has to the Grand Canyon.

Sure we can extend gratitude to those who care for and protect natural wonders as much as we can tribute the composers and orchestras who bring sounds together in an interesting way, but the tragedy would be in letting rigorous laws on intellectual property keep us from sharing ideas and innovating further. The tragedy would be in people not engaging with music (or any kind of art) because we said it didn’t belong to them — it wasn’t their property.

That being said, this is a research class. Our goal is to bring new ideas, or new collections of old ideas, to an audience. In order to serve that audience, it is our job to present those ideas in a way that could be further explored. With the unlimited space provided in my google doc, it is easy enough to include citations of those who have influenced my thoughts.

Furthermore, as a researcher who believes in the value of ideas themselves, and not their value because they are mine, I’m not tempted to represent someone else’s work as my own. Therein lies a sort of humorous paradox of this whole intellectual property idea. I hypothesize that those who are most skeptical of the idea of intellectual property are least likely to represent someone’s idea as their own. There would be no point in doing so.

In this class, as researchers, I think it will be important for us to divorce our ego, to allow ideas (and words and art) to have a property of their own, and to search for the best way to share those beautiful, insightful ideas with others as freely as possible.

To distill all of my thoughts into one sentence: I don’t believe in property, however including citations, references and hat-tips for the audience’s further exploration can be included where the author/creator is able and willing to do so.