On 27-May-26 12:13, Eric Rescorla wrote:
On Tue, May 26, 2026 at 5:06 PM Martin Thomson <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Wed, May 27, 2026, at 07:38, Eric Rescorla wrote:
> That's a non-answer. I've submitted many PRs to I-Ds and I can't think
> of any instance in which anyone has asked me if my text was original,
> and I doubt very much they are running plagiarism detectors, so to the
> extent to which this is the author's responsibility, I don't see much
> evidence they are fulfilling it. If you are creating a new requirement,
> I think you should first demonstrate it's practical.
This is because there is an implicit expectation: you are expected to not
submit plagiarized material and we don't bother to check because we trust that
people will not do that. Our I-D repositories generally reference the IPMC
licensing requirements for contributions, which require that when a contributor
makes a contribution, they make certain licensing commitments. Implicit in
that is the requirement that a contributor is authorized to make those
commitments, which would not be the case if the material were plagiarized.
This is mostly but not entirely true. For example, the original material could be in the
public domain, as recognized by the first sentence of S 5.3." To the extent that a
Contribution or any portion thereof is protected by copyright or other rights of
authorship,". That doesn't preclude it being plagiarized.
However, I think the important point here is that it's not the *author's*
burden to verify that the content is not plagiarized in this case. Rather they
are just relying on the contributor not to submit plagiarized material. This, I
agree, is a respect in which AI tools may be different. However, new text that
stated that the author was generally responsible for ensuring proper provenance
of material rather than just with respect to AI would be new, and I believe
unworkable.
I think the present draft needs to stay out of legal stickiness like that. While I feel
sure we need to say "no plagiarism", it's probably better to avoid placing what
look like unreasonable obligations, with possible legal implications, on the
authors/editors.
I just looked again at the IEEE guidelines, and they say "Plagiarism in any form is
unacceptable and is considered a serious breach of professional conduct, with potentially severe
ethical and legal consequences." But there is no formal duty placed on authors, beyond the
headline "AVOID PLAGIARISM". I assume the IEEE checked with counsel before publishing
these guidelines.
Brian
--
rswg mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
