Originally published by Linda Coles on LinkedIn: Are We All Guilty of Plagiarism At Some Point?
Plagiarism: the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock this last couple of days, I think most of us are aware of the similarities between Melania Trump’s speech and Michelle Obama’s speech of 2008, they are so very, very similar. Was it plagiarism?
But now it turns out it was a simple mistake, a human error in getting it so wrong, and not plagiarism at all.
Meredith McIver, a speechwriter for the Trumps has since explained what happened in her interview with CNN :
"Over the phone, she (Melania Trump) read me some passages from Mrs. Obama's speech as examples. I wrote them down and later included some of the phrasing in the draft that ultimately became the final speech. I did not check Mrs. Obama's speeches. This was my mistake, and I feel terrible for the chaos I have caused Melania and the Trumps, as well as to Mrs. Obama. No harm was meant."
What I find a bit odd is that if Melania had already read Michelle’s speech to the speechwriter over the phone, that she didn’t then realise how close the one created for her was to the original before delivering it. Or did she think no one would notice in this big digital world we live in?
We’ve all used other peoples thoughts and ideas and even images on Facebook and in other places and passed them off as our own, haven’t we? In business we’ve probably all done something similar to the speech debacle without even realising it, perhaps written out notes from a book we’ve read for instance, and then turned them into an article or a presentation. It’s those notes, phrases and key words that we copied out then weaved into our own work that made the point in the original work in the first place. Getting so frightening close to the original, in this case Mrs. Obama’s speech, is not on. So should it be a big deal or should we consider it flattery?
I remember sitting through a social media workshop that a local business group had put on and I went along because there is always an opportunity to learn something new. About half way through, I began to realise that all of the content so far was really very familiar and then the penny dropped. The person who had put it together, had simply copied the ideas directly from my first book, pretty much in it’s entirety! After I’d sat and seethed until the presentation ended, I then decided, actually, I was quite flattered. Someone had thought the content was good enough to share with a room full of other business people, it was just a pity that presenter got the attribution for it and not me, the rightful owner.