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I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

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Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#131

Post by eesmith »

lr1970 wrote: post #109
nefrix wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this is happening only in Romania, but looks like is been a common practice for politicians all over.

Plagiarism is a form of lying. Politicians are liars. No surprise that plagiarism in political circles is rampant. Quite often such MS and PhD thesis are written by "ghost writers" for a fee. Politicians are busy advancing their political careers and a degree is needed just for its title not its content. PhD as a modern form of aristocratic title :-)

This loses its sting after you realize all fiction is a form of lying. Dante did not, it turns out, actually visit hell.

Or, "I'm Charlie Stross, and I tell lies for money. That is, I'm a science fiction writer" - https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cr...

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#132

Post by plagiarist »

ufocia wrote: post #116
plagiarist wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't some of these schemes actually possible but only if you are a scumbags? It's somehow always get a ballon mortgage to buy multi-family housing and raise the rents by 100%, or buy dilapidated shacks and get section 8 money while putting nothing in to improve squalid conditions.

I thought that Section 8 housing has to meet some minimum standards. Are they really that minimal?

I don't have a fantastic recollection of the article I saw, but either the standards were or the enforcement was all but nonexistent.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#133

Post by astura »

uxp100 wrote: post #99
toxik wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot copy from yourself. Reusing material and passing it off as new, no matter its author, is plagiarism.

As a student anyway. Self plagiarism is a controversial topic in other circumstances. Many academics feel that if they described some element of an experiment some way it’s because that’s the best way they could imagine. If they do the experiment in some other way, or write up something for other publications or whatever it would be absurd to not take their own sentences if they want.

Which would be fine, as long as they cited their first experiment.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#134

Post by dan-robertson »

notahacker wrote: post #125
dan-robertson wrote: post #14

What strikes me from the examples in the OP is that this method of plagiarism doesn’t seem very easy. How would you produce this kind of thing? Eg maybe you read a lot and collect a large number of flowery phrases to use over time or maybe you just pinch phrases you like from whatever you read today. I guess I usually associate plagiarism with less effort than seems to have been required here.

The more interesting question is whether he lifted entire plots from other books or just used the collage-of-website-text to fill specific details This just looks like a sloppy writer saving time on understanding typical California mansion layouts and features or how snipers set up or British music in the 1990s or what Juarez is like by minimally revising the first Google result he found to generate the descriptive p…

Yeah, I think that’s a more relevant question to the whole plagiarism thing. It may be that it’s just easier to show little sentences in the Reddit post.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#135

Post by Engineering-MD »

ColinWright wrote: post #100
malfist wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but what? If I can't grant myself rights to my work, then who can?

Plagiarism is not the same as copyright infringement. It's about passing off material as new when it isn't. You can quote any previous work, others and/or your own, but you must highlight/identify it as such.

That includes citing your work that is unpublished (there are valid ways to cite unpublished work), and building on it which would be fine in many cases.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#136

Post by rthkljlkrj »

Zandikar wrote: post #3

Normally I'd complain about linking to reddit, but there's a level of rigor here that I think is worthy of attention and discussion. I'm not a mod or anything, but I've seen blog posts here with less effort and citation than this hit the front page all the time. It's also about a month old according to the reddit timestamps, so the discussion isn't really ongoing there (Though of course this hitting HN could revive i…

[dead]

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#137

Post by washadjeffmad »

dmurray wrote: post #45

This is plagiarism by any academic or artistic standard, but as a commercial or legal matter, this level of copying doesn't come close to copyright infringement. And no one should want it to.

Although, I did find it odd the redditor suggested YouTubers and internet personalities as potential avenues for dissemination, since those are the people who make their careers not off the originality of their content, but their ability to do what Mark Dawson has done: quickly assimilate information and arguments, assemble into compelling narratives, and monetize amplification of engagement through networking and modern mechanisms.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#138

Post by fauigerzigerk »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #52
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #33

I'm not really convinced by this or several other recent plagiarism scandals. I have some experience of using the automated tools and I think people get a false sense of confidence from them, both in the sense of "this was definately copied from X" (rather than a shared original source) and "this is morally wrong, because the computer said so". The example of the music description for example. It's obviously lifted f…

There's a lot of seemingly random instances though, like the first ones which seem oddly specific, flowery descriptions. I'm having a hard time believing those phrases coincidentally came out the same. If we're to believe op who claims they only checked the first couple pages of each book which were free to access, this seems quite damning. Writing isn't coding, this is not the same a just copying some snippet from s…

I'm not a writer either and I know nothing about plagiarism, but it would seem harsh to judge a novelist by the same standard as an academic.

Academics are expected to use citations, not primarily because reusing a 5-word phrase would in itself be problematic, but because it's important for other scientists to be able to trace the idea back to its original context.

Novelists on the other hand can't just include a footnote reference at the end of each sentence. And borrowing bits and pieces from other artists is completely normal, even desirable, in many arts. It's how the art form evolves.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#139

Post by holoduke »

rerdavies wrote: post #59
holoduke wrote: post #20

I have really never understood how you can fall for people with how to get rich guides. Just do your own thing. Dont look at others too much. Rich wont make you happy anyway.

According to studies, rich DOES make you happy.[1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/14/the-bi...

If your attitude is to become rich and your current situation is unhappy you wont be happy. You probably wont get rich as well. Wrong attitudes causes a lot of people to remain in their bubble full of jealously behavior. Most rich people dont give a damn about money. They do care about what the do and most have some passion in that. Thats what makes you happy. Not the money.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#140

Post by notahacker »

dan-robertson wrote: post #134
notahacker wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more interesting question is whether he lifted entire plots from other books or just used the collage-of-website-text to fill specific details This just looks like a sloppy writer saving time on understanding typical California mansion layouts and features or how snipers set up or British music in the 1990s or what Juarez is like by minimally revising the first Google result he found to generate the descriptive p…

Yeah, I think that’s a more relevant question to the whole plagiarism thing. It may be that it’s just easier to show little sentences in the Reddit post.

I guess it's also easier to argue an author serendipitously ended up with the same trope-heavy story beats as Live and Let Die or Dr No in their spy thriller than it is to argue they serendipitously ended up with references to "the harlequinade of youth" and "fur-skinned Afghans" in a street scene. But the former is even lazier writing
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