Pressure Rises On German Science Minister In Plagiarism Scandal 130
An anonymous reader writes "Germany's minister for science and education, who is currently under investigation by her alma mater for plagiarizing parts of her Ph.D thesis, is facing new accusations: a total of 92 alleged incidents of plagiarism (German) have been documented by a blogger, who calls 'this number of violations inexcusable.'"
She should step down. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, what example does that set that your Minister for Science and Education is a cheat?
Go Germany!!!!!!
State of the question (Score:1, Insightful)
As an university teacher once told me: Copy from 1 is plagiarism, from 5 is an analysis, from 92 is summarizing the state of the question
Re:Oh who gives a fuck? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh who gives a fuck? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Pirate Party is actually clear that they want to retain the creator's right to attribution. It's only the economic rights they want to abolish.
The problem being that the creators sustain them selves by the same economic rights the pirates want to abolish.
The Germans are self-policing... (Score:5, Insightful)
... as shown by the website here: http://de.vroniplag.wikia.com/wiki/Home/English [wikia.com]
As an academic who earned a PhD in the US and worked as faculty in Sweden and now Germany, you're being quite naïve if you don't think this happens in every country including the US. The difference is that the Germans self-police (in standard volunteer wiki-style), while the US and Sweden do not, to my knowledge.
As far as it being a "sport", that's ridiculous. Being that we (Germany's inhabitants) take titles very seriously, with good reason, as the Chancellor has a doctorate in Quantum Chemistry, every thesis should be thoroughly scrutinized.
I would wager my degrees that the percentage of pages plagiarized are very similar between the US, Sweden and Germany. We just find the plagiarism over here and hold politicians (and all others) accountable.
Re:Oh who gives a fuck? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, and I might sustain myself with a right granted to me by law that forces everyone to give me a few dollars every so often for no reason at all. I mean, sure, authors think of new material, but the mere fact that that's the only way they know how to sustain themselves doesn't justify such freedom-violating laws. Find a business model or die.
Re:Oh who gives a fuck? (Score:4, Insightful)
And those rights also sustain some grandchildren of the creators. The world needs some IP rights, but they are completely out of control right now. So if any negotiations are to be balanced, the anti-IP side has to start with wanting to abolish IP altogether, since the pro-IP side wants to extend it to eternity.
Re:Oh who gives a fuck? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, in that case, you can make the same statement to book buyers: Find a funding model, or die. (Although it's not quite that bad, fortunately).
But there is no lack of other potential funding models. The main difficulty, both for authors and readers, is that we aren't used to these other funding models, and thus we're confused by them, scared by them, and unable to take full advantage of them.
Right now something exciting is happening, as Kickstarter is gradually, slowly, wrapping people's minds around the idea that you can approach creative projects as a investments/ventures for non monetary gain.