On the copyright page of Jan Adkins' book Toolchest was placed this statement:
"We have gone to considerable difficulty and expense to assemble a staff of necromancers,. sorcerers, shamans, conjurers and lawyers to visit nettlesome and mystifying discomforts on any ninny who endeavors to reproduce or transmit this book in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission from the publisher. Watch yourself."
When a New York publishing house brought out a volume of blank pages called The Nothing Book, the publisher was accused of plagiarism by the Belgian publisher of a blank-paged book that had been creatively titled The Memoirs of an Amnesiac.
The American firm rejected the claim, contending that blankness was in the public domain, therefor not subject to copyright restrictions. --UPI
The Rev. William Wallace, a Dominican priest and former researcher at Catholic University who for 15 years studied the manuscripts of Galileo Galilei, the 16th century scientist whose work has been called the foundation of all modern science, found that all three of Galileo's most important notebooks show "considerable evidence of copying, or at least of being based on other sources....Practically all of this material...derives from textbooks and lecture notes that were being used at the Collegio Romano, a Roman university Galileo visited."
"Today people would call this plagiarism," Wallace noted. "But at that time everyone did it. People then felt that ideas, once shown to be right, were automatically the property of everyone. People were flattered to have their class notes used by other instructors. "I'm not saying Galileo was not the 'father' of modern science, just that there was a 'grandfather' too." --Washington Post
In 1991 a committee at Boston University - where Martin Luther King, Jr. received his doctoral degree from the Division of Theological Studies - concluded that he had plagiarized the writings of others in his 1955 dissertation.
This followed the 1990 findings by Clayborne Carson, Stanford history professor chosen by Dr. King's widow to head the king Papers Project, that other academic papers by the late Nobel Peace Prize winner contained numerous passages that "can be defined as plagiarism".
His conclusion was supported by Keith D. Miller, Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University, who added that King's tendency to plagiarize should be understood in the context of his background on the pulpit, where "preachers borrow partly because their culture fails to define the word as a commodity and instead assumes that everyone creates language and no one owns it."
All the scholars involved stressed that their findings did not diminish King's accomplishments.
-- Parade 8/94
Writer's Digest has also offered four interesting copywrongs:
Alvin B. Harrison's short story titled :The Perlu", which ran in the June 1935 issue of Esquire Magazine, was exposed by alert readers as a plagiarism of Ambrose Bierce's "The Damned Thing"...which, in turn, was revealed as a rip-off of Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla".
Impersonators of writers Edna Ferber and Octavus Roy Cohen once appeared together on the same lecture program - neither aware that the other was an impostor.
Lloyd Lewis, age 15, entered a 1936 essay-writing contest sponsored by performer Eddie Cantor and carried off he $5,000 prize. He had copied, word for word - and in professed innocence - an article by the president of the University of Newark, entitled "How Can We Stay Out of War?" from an issue of Peace Digest.
Dr. John Hedley Barnhart, a bibliographer at the New York Botanical Gardens in 1919, found that 14 scientists profiled in the most recent Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography were fictitious, although their bios had been reprinted continuously since 1886.
Embarrassed Appleton execs vowed to set their house in order. But by 1936 an additional 70 counterfeit biographies were exposed.
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