What’s the value of intellectual property rights if we Filipinos are allowed to omit the acknowledgements of our citations?
Supreme Court (SC) dismissed the plagiarism case of Associate Justice Mariano Del Castillo because of several lame reasons. The SC said that the decision Del Castillo made from the case of Vinuya et al vs. Executive Secretary, where he used three foreign authors’ works without the attributions, did not have malicious intent.
According to an Inquirer.net report by Rodel Rodis, Del Castillo’s legal researcher told them that she accidentally deleted the footnotes, and the court recognized her defense. Del Castillo also defended that his computer did not have a software program that can detect plagiarism. He did not only plagiarize but he even changed the idea of the journal to its opposite conclusion.
The excuse of not having a software program that could detect plagiarism is not a forgivable justification. They don’t have an excuse for not having a plagiarism detector because until now, even students are still taught how to cite manually.
Living in the technology generation, our ENGLRES course still taught us how to cite and acknowledge both electronic and manually. If we can do it, why couldn’t he? If it were his legal researcher’s fault, she could have double checked it.
Plagiarism is still plagiarism. Whether it will mean nothing to everyone or it was done accidentally, it is still plagiarism. “Plagiarism is a species of intellectual fraud. It consists of unauthorized copying that the copier claims (whether explicitly or implicitly, and whether deliberately or carelessly) is original with him and the claim causes the copier’s audience to behave otherwise than it would if it knew the truth.”(Richard A. Posner, The Little Book of Plagiarism. Pantheon, 2007).
If this was all true, plagiarism is still present whether Del Castillo forgot or his legal researcher accidentally deleted the citations. It does not matter whether the person did it purposely or intentionally. Thing is, the person did it and he or she is liable for it.
The person did damage and he or she must do something to repair it. We all commit mistakes and we are liable to make up for it. It is simple as that. If we students have no excuse to plagiarize, I don’t see any difference with Del Castillo’s case.
If associate justices can make this kind of mistake and gets away with it, then I suppose we can copy someone’s work and get away with it too.
I may not be involved physically and technically in the case but I am affected. I am humiliated for our country not only because of the foreign scholars that Del Castillo did not acknowledge, accidentally or not, but also how he used a part of one’s scholarly journal and twisted its meaning.
If I were the journal’s writer, I will feel disrespected. I worked hard for my journal, only to find out that my work was copied by someone. It is even worse that this person used my idea and meant the opposite meaning of it.
Looking from a different angle, the credibility of the Philippine judicial system is questionable. How can a clear case of plagiarism be dismissed? Is it because the involved person is one of the SC officials? They should do something more than just saying that they committed a mistake.
In this world, everyone makes mistakes but we must pay for them.
For us Lasallians, if plagiarism will not be an offense, then I think research subjects should no longer be valued by the students much. We can copy one’s work and claim that it is our own “research.” What’s the value of teaching students the MLA or APA citation, footnotes and bibliography if we are allowed to copy one’s work without citing the authors?
If this case will happen again in the future, I will feel sorry for all the students and alumni who paid extra time just to cite their sources in their research papers and thesis. Their technical efforts are but nothing.
I may sound like I don’t commit mistakes but I just feel like there is injustice in the SC. It is really a big issue since the SC is a very powerful institution, but because of what happened, it seems that there is something wrong.
This is not a student who can just have a zero because he or she plagiarized. This is a real life case we’re talking about. It is time for the people and especially the students to be aware of what’s happening to our country and do something about it.
If we are to plagiarize, let’s all go for the excuse, “I don’t have any malicious intent,” or “it was just an honest mistake.”
