By Regina Bendix and Kilian Bizer
Germany is currently shaken by revelations that defense minister Karl Theodor von Guttenberg’s dissertation is ripe with plagiarized passages. After struggling to keep the upper hand for five days, he asked his alma mater to revoke the doctoral degree so as to be rid of the discussion. Yet regardless of Minister von Guttenberg’s political future, thinking about the principles involved in academic integrity provides food for thought with regard to cultural property.
Plagiarism is a citation or paraphrase without proper attribution. A passage from a known author that assists my argument or that I would like to argue against in my own work of scholarship must be set apart with quotation marks, and a footnote will tell the reader just where I found this passage. Generally, neither the person I quote nor I will earn anything from such academic integrity, but I benefit in as much as proper craftsmanship allows others to check my integrity as a scholar and my standing in the academic community will hopefully stay steady. The only one profiting from such integrity is the reader as he can follow the arguments and counterarguments throughout the discussion and can determine who misinterpreted or simply misunderstood one another. Such transparency allows the reader to build up her own knowledge.
There are some insights and phrases that are harder to cite. “All the world’s a stage” might be from Shakespeare, but it might have already been said by Aristotle. It is a phrase that has reached proverbial status; its copyright status has, with the passing of centuries or even millennia, been eased, it is common knowledge.
Traditional cultural expressions and traditional knowledge – the core elements in WIPO terminology of cultural property debates – are, so to speak, on their way in the other direction. Long held to be part of a commons (naturally with various restrictions, such as, for instance, ritual knowledge), the increasing interest in culture as a resource fosters vying for property rights and delineating ownership.
The question is: can one bring some more logic into the struggle to devise cultural property regimes through an analogy with plagiarism? Is, for instance, the European Union’s geographic indication system for various foods analogous to a citation? Does a sui generis right for a particular cultural practice assist potential users/buyers to acknowledge the originators of this practice?
Most of all, is humanity capable of such a switch? If, again, we turn to plagiarism: while academics punish plagiarism, literary authors, composers, indeed, many artists enjoy a great deal more license. When we savor a work of art, we also savor its intertextual reference to other works we may know. A composer may note that a particular composition represents variations on a theme by an earlier musician – but perhaps he also builds on the education of his audience who recognizes the allusion. A painter or photographer or movie director may “quote” excerpts from an earlier work and the audience may (or may not) savor the craft with which the lineage is established. Artists have also long built on folk traditions, from Dvorak’s Slavonic dances to various fashion designers borrowing elements of folk costume, to mention just one of countless examples. Again, the “citations” are generally known, often the artists openly state their artistic debts to one or another cultural commons.
The issue, then, would seem to be twofold: the cultural citation that is not openly acknowledged and its use for personal or exclusive gain. If it were possible to delimit cultural property regimes in such a way to focus on penalizing and thus forestalling such cases, one might also be able to keep open the cultural commons for the kind of artistic trade and aesthetic growth that has made cultural contact essential and enriching in human existence.
The plagiarism of Germany’s defense minister demonstrates how important it is to be transparent about one’s sources in order to participate in a culture which acknowledges the works of others and respects them for it. In academia, the sharing of ideas works comparatively well because of the strict institutionalized rule to identify the sources. The task would then be to find analogous rules for the realm of cultural property.