The Little Book of Plagiarism

The title, the author and the subject are all intermingled and have hopelessly tangled threads which make it difficult to sort out the whole thing. If you're baffled, don't worry. So am I. And if you think I'm batty, don't worry. I am.

Title of the book? "The little book of plagiarism". Author? Richard A. Posner. To be released on? Jan 16th 2007. Fair enough. Posner is a judge. He churns out books and papers by the bucketload ( 47, to be accurate ).

Problem? Introducing the 'Little Book of Plagarism' by Marie Stinson
21 October 2003. Uhhh...Co-incidence? Maybe....Two or more people can and do come up with the same title. True. But I'd say that when you're writing a book on plagiarism and you're a judge and an expert on intellectual property rights, you take extra care to avoid even the perception of impropriety. All Posner, one of his assistants, or someone at his publishers' had to do was google up the title. Was that done? You tell me.

Here's a line from Amazon's Editorial review of the book. "Posner focuses a lot on student plagiarism and seems to think all students should be considered suspect; schools that don't subscribe to detection software like Turnitin, he says, are 'naïve.' "

He's talking about software to detect literary theft. He's an expert on intellectual property theft. Maybe he thinks using the same title as an existing e-book to sell his own book isn't plagiarism. Considering he's the expert and I'm infamous for stealing peoples' titles for my own posts, this does sound rather hypocritical of me. But then, there's different standards for a judge, professor and a published author, as compared to a lowly freelance writer.