A moral question: if you discover someone's done something morally wrong, that you think might not have been noticed, should you call them on it?

Who are you going to call on this? (Ghostbusters!) Will anyone care? I can't see how you'd get in trouble with careful phrasing, and quoting parallel passages.

(of course YOU've never consciously stolen from another's work...the genesis of these crimes is often complex and cloudy)

would you

1)welcome the inquiry as an opportunity for self-examination?

2)just tell the blogger/detective to get a life?

also this

Should I post it saying "I'm not accusing him of anything, but this passage definitely looks to have been copied almost-verbatim"?

strikes me as textbook passive-aggressive. posting it IS accusing him. if you don't want to do that, contact him first but I'd be amazed if he tells you anything other than to piss up a rope...

ok, well there was this 80s ABC (Australian Broadcasting Govt run station) young adults soap opera called 'Sweet and Sour". It was based around a girl trying to get her rock band off the ground. One of the story lines had her love interest (David Reyne - James Reyne of Australian Crawl's little brother) release a song which got a lot of radio airplay. Problem was that it was almost identical to a song she had written not long before. Much 'how could you steal my song, you bastard!' 'Ive never even heard your song, bitch! I wrote this one ages ago!" type confrontation ensued until she had a memory flashback of hearing him hum the song in a cafe. She'd subconsciously plagerised him! Oh, the drama!

ANYWAY, can we at least assume a lawyer would be fairly smart and have the capability to be quite tricky? What I'm saying is, why would someone copy a paragraph verbatim when they could still steal it and mix it up to the point where it wasn't technically plagerism? Maybe he'd read a ton of railway books while researching and subconsciously typed out the entire paragraph thinking it was his thoughts. I don't know. Its possible, right?

Secondly, don't you think a "Top Academic on railway history" probably would have read the book himself?

Thirdly, I really don't see what you have to gain here except to feel like a smartypants for exposing something in an obscure book from 20 years ago. If this really is a question of morality, it seems a whole lot more immoral to put so much effort into playing snitch.

But mostly, the guy is a lawyer. If you do this, and something does come of it (which, youre right, it probably wont), be prepared to say "Hi!" to slander and meet lining of your pockets.

If you really have to do it then maybe you could googleproof the living fuck out of it or put it in an obscurely named downloadable document file that only the readers of your blog will download.

A factually-based approach shouldn't be vulnerable. Print the two passages side-by-side, note which passage came from which book and their titles, authors and publication dates, then state that the reader can make up their own mind in regard to the provenance of the later-published passage.

If the plagarism is egregious enough, that would be all that is needed. If it is somewhat disguised then this is a much safer way to call it under suspicion than to make an outright accusation.

On the other hand: you could do the guy a favor. If he has professional credibility at stake in other ways, then yeah, there's some chance that outing this could -- just maybe -- come around to harm him. And there's some chance that this particular steal was a harmless one, and not a habit, and in the end everyone will be happier if you don't say anything -- which I'd say outweighs the rule-based must-tattle notion in terms of overall moral good. (Lawrence Kohlberg would agree, maybe!)

So in the end I think it just comes down to which one you feel like doing, or feel comfortable doing. If you're going to say it, just treat the book as you would any other -- you don't have to "accuse" him, you can just say you stopped reading because something seemed familiar, and you realized it was a passage from another book. If you don't do that, it'll be as a favor -- an act of mercy, really -- and not at all because there's any problem with doing it.

and he is still very much around, being a Top Academic on railway history himself.

Any suggestions as to what The Right Thing To Do is?

* his website is www dot francisbennion dot com

-- Forest Pines (il...), November 12th, 2005 11:02 AM. (ForestPines) (later)

Answers
(actually, rechecking that, the Top Academic *isn't* very much around any more - he died five years ago)