Posts matching tags 'plagiarism'
2008/2/27
It has emerged that L. Ron Hubbard may have lifted parts of Scientology (or at least its title) from a 1934 text. Scientologie: Wissenschaft von der Beschaffenheit und der Tauglichkeit des Wissens ("Science of the Constitution and Usefulness of Knowledge and Knowing"), written by a Dr. A Nordenholz in 1934. Alas, Dr. Nordenholz didn't have the vision to start a religion or establish celebrity centres, and thus vanished into obscurity.
(via Boing Boing) ¶ [no comments]
2006/4/27
When he handed down the ruling in the Da Vinci Code plagiarism case, Mr. Justice Peter Smith could not resist byt embed his own coded message into it:
The first clue - the word claimants with the s in italics - is found in paragraph one of the document. In the next paragraph, the m in claimant is italicised. Read together, the italicised letters in the first seven paragraphs spell out the self-referential legend "Smithy code".
After the "Smithy Code" series, there are an additional 25 jumbled letters contained on the first 14 pages of the document, Mr Tench said.This isn't the first instance of judges having a bit of fun with the presentation of their rulings:
Although some of the more creative members of the bench have occasionally been known to write their judgments in verse or rhyming couplets, few have gone to the same cunning lengths as Mr Justice Smith. "It's not really something that you expect from a judge," Mr Tench said. "Someone said to me: 'Isn't that rather irresponsible?', which I thought was a rather joyless reaction. It just shows that our judges are human."
2002/10/8
Bubblegum pop producer Pete Waterman (of Stock-Aitken- fame) has revealed that he lifted the structures of many of his songs from classical compositions. Kylie Minogue's I Should Be So Lucky is apparently based on Pachelbel's Canon in D, and Dead Or Alive's You Spin Me Round (Like A Record) borrows from Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, one of about 20 times Waterman has copied from Wagner. (I presume he refers to chord progressions and harmonies.) Waterman also has the extraordinary temerity to compare himself to The Beatles and Burt Bacharach.
And while we've brought up Kylie Minogue, the ubiquitous pop star has recently described herself as a drag queen caught in a woman's body. Funny; I once said almost the same thing about her.