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Authorship in the post-academic, post-human age - Allegra Lab

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In 1964, when describing the threshold for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio, the US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said that while he couldn’t define precisely what constituted hard-core pornography, “I know it when I see it”. The problem, of course, is that the “I know it when I see it” test is highly subjective, because one man’s pornography is another’s erotic art. A similar issue plagues the subject of plagiarism. As Mario Biagioli (2012: 455) has argued, “Plagiarism is one of those notions that are stabilised by the emotions they express and elicit rather than by their conceptual clarity”. The very fact that it’s often difficult to reach agreement on whether plagiarism has or hasn’t occurred suggests that the topic is good to think with. As someone with a longstanding interest in publishing and conceptions of authorship, it strikes me that the question of how ideas travel and who, if anyone, owns them, usefully highlights areas of tension between academic, trade and media pub

Print In 1964, when describing the threshold for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio , the US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said that while he couldn’t define precisely what constituted hard-core pornography, “I know it when I see it”. The problem, of course, is that the “I know it when I see it” test is highly subjective, because one man’s pornography is another’s erotic art. A similar issue plagues the subject of plagiarism. As Mario Biagioli (2012: 455) has argued, “Plagiarism is one of those notions that are stabilised by the emotions they express and elicit rather than by their concept

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