Lethem Reading Assignment

In the subsection of “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” titled “Usemonopoly”, Lethem uses the quote “everything from attempts” to “defendant as young as twelve”. The original source was fairly easy to find; I simply Googled the original author’s name and the title of the article published in The New York Times and the first result that appeared linked me to Robert Boynton’s article on The New York Times website. In Boynton’s article, he first prefaces the quote by describing an incident with students at Swarthmore College leaking confidential information online about the vulnerability of voting machines created by Diebold Election Systems during the 2000 presidential election. Because of litigation, Diebold threatened to sue and Swarthmore College had to pull the confidential information from their website. Boynton then writes this quote, explaining that copyrighting issues have plagued all fields of study and forms of entertainment.

Lethem instead starts off the “Usemonopoly” subsection with this quote to set the stage for his further discussion on the corrupt system of copyright in our world today. Lethem does make minor changes to the quote, such as removing an aside that Boynton had put in parenthesis, and removing and introduction to the Recording Industry Association example. They are made mostly to make the passage shorter and more concise, as the message of the passage still transfers in Lethem’s version. In an academic setting, this would be blatant and obvious plagiarism, as Lethem almost copies word for word what Boynton published. If Lethem did not cite the quote, it would also be appropriation, as even though it is not a direct copy-paste of the passage, the majority of it, as well as the major themes of the passage, transfer directly into Lethem’s paper and uses it as his own.