Bernardini's actions don't meet the technical definition of plagiarism, since he never presented the work as his own. But it falls into the same pocket, in my book. A little over six years ago (Gods! That long now!) a friend and fellow academician asked me to write something about the subject, because other academics(!!) at his college were taking a sanguine view on the subject: "it isn't that bad," they were saying. Part of my response was the following:
"A comparison here might be with identity theft, because the thief is not only stealing my credit rating and bank accounts, but is effectively stealing *me*, in the form of my digital, or even public, persona."
Persons not intimately engaged in some form of creative pursuit might easily fail to understand how fundamentally *personal* it is, in that I have spent months or years pouring my *PERSON* into this work.
What I don't understand with the above case is how the authors and victims have lost their materials. When you email a document to someone, you still have that document in your possession. It is over 40 years since anyone was writing on a typewriter, so even when a paper MS is sent to someone, the original file remains on disk. Proving provenance can be a nightmare, even with date/time stamps on the file(s). But Bernardini evidently made no effort to claim the materials as his own, so provenance was never even challenged.
I still hope the arrogant fucker gets to learn why you never want to drop the soap in the shower.
Wow...I can think of nothing more demoralizing than someone stealing a manuscript that I may have been working on for a year or more. And by someone doing it for kicks? I think I'd rip his chest open and leave his still-beating heart on the sidewalk.
Right? Even if there's a copy (which, hopefully, they all had copies), it doesn't matter. Writers get kicked harder than rented mules just as writers. But to add THIS into the mix....
Fascinating story!
Bernardini's actions don't meet the technical definition of plagiarism, since he never presented the work as his own. But it falls into the same pocket, in my book. A little over six years ago (Gods! That long now!) a friend and fellow academician asked me to write something about the subject, because other academics(!!) at his college were taking a sanguine view on the subject: "it isn't that bad," they were saying. Part of my response was the following:
"A comparison here might be with identity theft, because the thief is not only stealing my credit rating and bank accounts, but is effectively stealing *me*, in the form of my digital, or even public, persona."
Persons not intimately engaged in some form of creative pursuit might easily fail to understand how fundamentally *personal* it is, in that I have spent months or years pouring my *PERSON* into this work.
What I don't understand with the above case is how the authors and victims have lost their materials. When you email a document to someone, you still have that document in your possession. It is over 40 years since anyone was writing on a typewriter, so even when a paper MS is sent to someone, the original file remains on disk. Proving provenance can be a nightmare, even with date/time stamps on the file(s). But Bernardini evidently made no effort to claim the materials as his own, so provenance was never even challenged.
I still hope the arrogant fucker gets to learn why you never want to drop the soap in the shower.
Cogently thought out AS ALWAYS, Gares. It's a considerable prefrontal cortex ya got there.
Wow...I can think of nothing more demoralizing than someone stealing a manuscript that I may have been working on for a year or more. And by someone doing it for kicks? I think I'd rip his chest open and leave his still-beating heart on the sidewalk.
Right? Even if there's a copy (which, hopefully, they all had copies), it doesn't matter. Writers get kicked harder than rented mules just as writers. But to add THIS into the mix....