[Corpora-List] Plagiarism of Leonid Brezhnev

[Tristan Miller]

Greetings.

On Sunday 04 November 2012, Yuri Tambovtsev wrote:
>  I have analysed three books signed by the late General Secretary of the
> communist party of the former Soviet Union. It turned out that it was
> not Leonid Brezhnev who wrote them. He hired three other men who wrote
> these books for him.

It wouldn't be the first time the holder of that office laid claim to 
writing something he really didn't.  Does anyone really believe that it was 
Stalin and not Arnold Chikobava who wrote "Marxism and Problems of 
Linguistics"?  As others have already remarked, though, it's not at all 
unusual for politicians to use ghostwriters.

> May I ask you a question now? I wonder if I can
> call it plagiarism?

If they were works for hire, no, you can't call it plagiarism.  It may be 
intellectually dishonest, but it's not as if Brezhnev copied passages from 
a prior work without the knowledge or consent of the original author.

Regards,
Tristan

-- 
Tristan Miller, Doctoral Researcher | Tel: +49 6151 16 6166
Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab | Fax: +49 6151 16 5455
Department of Computer Science      | miller at ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de
Technische Universität Darmstadt    | http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/
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