[pp.int.general] Plagiarism is bad because it infringes copyright????

[Richard Stallman]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/01/german-defence-minister-resigns-plagiarism
shows something repulsive:

    On Monday, German minister of education and research, Annette Schavan,
    welcomed the withdrawal of Guttenberg's PhD, telling reporters she did
    not "consider the incident to be a trifle".

    While she stopped short of calling for his resignation, she said:
    "Intellectual theft is not a small thing. The protection of intellectual
    property is a higher good."

She claims that each of a dozen unrelated laws is a "higher good" that
ustifies trampling most people's freedom and interests.

Even if we forget about most of those laws, and imagine that she's
only talking about copyright when she says "intellectual property",
her statement is still twisted, because she is distorting the concept
of plagiarism.  She wants people to think that plagiarism is bad
because of copyright law.  Does she think it is ok to lie about text
in the public domain?  If Guttenberg had bought a license for the
text, would that make his lie ok?

She ought to resign for this.

Is someone from the German pirate party reading this?  Would it like
to use this to attack her and the concept of "intellectual property"?


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org