On August 13, 2012, Sen. Tito Sotto gave a privileged speech on why he is against the passage of the RH Bill.  He cited a personal experience on how taking contraceptives prior to pregnancy caused his wife to lose the child they had conceived after discontinuing the use of contraceptive pills.  It would have been a good speech.  No one can blame the senator for opposing the RH Bill on the ground of a sad personal experience with contraceptive pills.  But instead of gaining empathy for his cause, Senator Sotto has reaped antipathy and infamy.

It turned out that his speech was made by his staff.  His staff had copied parts of his speech word-for-word from a blog post.  The blog post also quoted from a published study by a research scientist.  The difference between the blog post and Senator Sotto’s speech boils down to one thing: attribution.  The blogger cited the source of the idea and named the author as well as the title of the study so that the netizen reader, if interested, can refer to the cited work and read it for himself.  The senator, by failing to attribute where he copied the idea and the words, was in fact, claiming them as his own.  This is what plagiarism is.

Plagiarism is not only copying ideas and expressions of ideas– it is passing off those ideas and expressions as one’s own original creation.  It is not a crime, yet.  It is unethical.

The senator first excused himself saying he knew nothing about the words in his speech as having been copied from someone else.  He then assigned blame to his speech writers.  His speech writers admitted their error but they justified their error by saying that they had quoted not the blogger but the original study.  It just so happened that the blogger and the speech writers of Senator Sotto copied exactly the same paragraph: it was just pure coincidence.  That may be true, but still, the speech ought to have reflected that the ideas and expressions of the idea were not Senator Sotto’s.  It is still plagiarism.  It is still unethical.

Senator Sotto gave another speech.  This time, he translated into Tagalog the ideas and expressions of Robert F. Kennedy.  When he was interviewed on the renewed charges of plagiarism, he denied any plagiarism.  This time around, his excuse was that someone sent him a text message with the exact English words.  What he did was he put the English words into Tagalog and then used it.  He claims this Tagalized version is not plagiarism.

Something’s wrong with Senator Sotto’s understanding of the concept of plagiarism.  It took years of sitting in the Senate before he unmasked himself as a person who has no intellectual integrity, but he did.  No Blue Ribbon Committee hearings, he had to open his mouth and expose his utter lack of understanding in the traffic of ideas.

First, everyone has ideas.  We all think.  Some of us think very profound thoughts all on our own.  Some of us, being mortal, are spurred on to great thoughts as a reaction to reading or hearing someone else’s ideas and expressions.

Second, ideas are communicated using expressions: we all string words together in a manner that is unique to us.  We all use words differently.  Our personalities permeate the words we choose and the way we use the words we choose.  This is called diction.

Third, plagiarism isn’t just limited to copying expressions of ideas (the words used); it also includes the copying of ideas themselves(someone else’s brainchild).  But that is not all that plagiarism is.  Plagiarism also involves the deceit of passing off the words and ideas as one’s own original creation.  This is what is unethical about it.

Fourth, you can copy someone else’s words; you can copy someone else’s ideas;  but you have to have the honesty to admit that you copied them and show to all the world from whom you copied them and where you copied them.  This is called attribution.  This is what bibliographies are for.

Fifth, even if you take an idea and translate it, the translation may be yours but the original idea was not.  You still have to attribute the original idea to the author.  You must say something like: “Taken from a speech by Robert F. Kennedy, translated by Senator Vincente Sotto.”  If I take Senator Sotto’s original composition “Magkaisa” and translated it into Cebuano, I would have to obtain his permission and pay a royalty for it because I am using his ideas, his lyrics, his melody and appropriating it as my own and tweaking it just a bit.  The tweaked part is mine but everything else is his.

Sixth, attribution is painstaking, but it is required.  It is required because the interested reader or listener can go to the original work and read the original work to judge if it has been misquoted, misinterpreted, or misconstrued.  The reader can then judge for himself if the copied idea or work has been wrenched from its context.

Seventh, attribution does not make you look stupid.  It makes you honest.  It makes you humble.  It makes you credible.  People will look at you and think that you read a lot and you think a lot.  And you are able to integrate the things you read with the things you think of and come up with another original idea or expression that is totally unique to you.  Attribution makes you an intellectual.

Senator Sotto should learn from former President Fidel V. Ramos.  He said; “less talk, less mistakes.”  (See, I have attributed the quote from the person I heard it from.) Who was it who said? “Better to close your mouth and leave people wondering than to open your mouth and confirm that you’re a fool.”   (This type of quote is called “fair use.”  I may not know who said it originally, but I distance myself from claiming that it is something I created myself.  I am not passing it off as an original quote from myself.)

I hope Senator Sotto does not intend to run again.  He got his senate seat thanks to his pals Vic and Joey, his wife Helen and his niece Sharon.  He gained it through popularity.  No one thought he was capable of much and no one expected much of him.  Until the impreachment proceedings of Chief Justice Corona, that is. There he was shown in a different light.  He looked competent and disciplined.   But what he had built over the course of a few months , he himself destroyed with these two speeches he made. The recalcitrance and intransigence with which he faced the criticisms, and the brazenness with which he postured himself do not augur well for his future political career.  He has lost the one thing a politician and public figure needs:  credibility.  Let me translate that into words that the Senator is bound to understand:  mawawalan ka na ng patol, sir.

No one will believe that the words that come out from your mouth are your own.  No one now will believe that you have original thoughts and ideas in your head!  In the end, you will suffer a worse fate than losing an election:  you will be ignored.  Since people will not know which words are your own and which are not your own, people will presume that they are all somebody else’s.

What does Ecclesiastes 5:3 say? “…a fool’s voice is known by multitude of words.”  Again, I wasn’t the one who said that, I am merely quoting King Solomon’s proverb.