Richard Posner: Copyright

Richard Posner: Copyright
Ethics Bites (Open University)
Host: Nigel Warbuton

Aged seventeen Kaavya Viswanathan signed a two-year book contract with the publisher Little Brown. The publisher agreed an advance of $500,000 and she sold the movie rights. By the time the first book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, was published in April 2006, she was nineteen and a sophomore at Harvard.

Within weeks the Harvard Crimson magazine discovered that her book reproduced almost verbatim, many passages from similar so-called ‘chick-lit’ novels. It seemed to be a blatant case of plagiarism. Indeed, so is this – because I’ve just reproduced, close to word-for-word, the opening passage of Richard Posner’s The Little Book of Plagiarism. So what exactly is plagiarism, how does it differ from copyright, and what’s wrong with it? Richard Posner is a judge and - he spoke to Ethics Bites down a somewhat crackly line from his home town of Chicago.

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