for everyone |
On Manny V. Pangilinan and a lesson in scruples
C’mon, let’s try thinking out of the box on this one.
The recent brouhaha over some admittedly plagiaristic portions of a Manny V. Pangilinan commencement speech (which triggered his immediate apology and a sincere offer to retire as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Ateneo) is – with all due respect - just another silly exercise in hypocrisy and double standards so typical of our elitist if sanctimonious society. What is infinitely more tragic (with apologies for a lifted and worn-out phrase), it serves to detract and distract our attention from the incomparably more pernicious and scandalously widespread corruption, outright lies, fraud and dishonesty of our political leaders and government functionaries.
While this may sound every bit like an apologia for Manny V. Pangilinan (or M.V.P., as he is aptly nicknamed), I hasten to add that I have never met the man nor do I think any apology was necessary. On the contrary, the man has so refreshingly displayed a character trait or commodity so sorely lacking in today’s world – scruples or a delicate conscience.
He could have easily claimed or feigned good faith, honest mistake, blamed his staff for sloppy attribution or any other typical lame excuse. Or, worse yet, he could have simply let the crisis go away as PGMA has done (with apparent impunity) on numerous instances.
Just consider, for instance, some random samplings of infamous quotes:
- “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
- “I will no longer seek the presidency (Dec., 2002)…” “No, no, I changed my mind (Oct., 2003), I will run (for May, 2004) to seek a direct mandate…”
- “Hello, Garci.”
- “Sec, may 200 ka dito.”
- “Jun, moderate their greed.”
- “I will decline to answer…am invoking EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE.”
- “I refuse to answer… on the ground of self-incremation.”
- “What are we in power for?”
In contrast, there’s M.V.P. without mincing words or further ado saying:
- “I wish to express my sincerest apology…”
- “… This has been a source of deep personal embarrassment for me.”
- “I take full and sole responsibility…” “I wish to retire from…Ateneo.”
And then, there’s the Son of Man, after doodling on the ground, suggesting:
“Let him who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.” Jn. 8:7
While ordinarily, plagiarism would be shrugged off or considered an all-too-common college student misdemeanor in the academia almost in the same category as rude behavior, vandalism or getting drunk and rowdy after a big win in some sports intramurals, Manny V. Pangilinan being Manny V. Pangilinan, he cannot be allowed to pee by the roadside on a lonely stretch of a provincial road without getting on the front page of every tabloid in the country.
Then again, if there is anything good or worthwhile that could come out of the whole unfortunate affair, it should promote a long hard look at so-called copyright infringement, intellectual property rights, monopolies, land patents and titles, etc., including plagiarism, with a view to re-examining and abolishing such imperialistic, oppressive and discriminatory legal enactments, decrees and practices. Maybe our time were better spent calling attention to the plight of impoverished emerging nations that are required and who continue to pay the old Roman tribute (now aptly called royalty) to the rich Western countries who invented and imposed such monopolistic legal sanctions, with the aid of the UN, World Bank, and WTO (acting in place of the kings, pharaohs, czars and emperors of old).
After all, nothing is really ours to claim and keep. Aborigines and indigenous peoples have no concept of private ownership. Everything is owned in common, a gift from their Supreme Being. Or, as St. Paul would remind us:
“What do you have that you have not received? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?” 1 Cor.4:7
What is the feudal system if not a case of some aristocrats with connections or affinity to the king and securing land grants for vast tracts of land “as far as the eye can see?” Thus, for centuries our marginalized farmers have been tilling and toiling the land of their landlords, descendants of some Spanish peninsulares clever enough to inveigle a so-called Spanish royal decree.
As any legal scholar will tell you, the issue of copyright infringement, intellectual property rights, copyright laws and patents, are merely legal fiction, more violated in their breach than observance. They were devised and invented by protectionist-minded legislators to serve the interests of their industrialist benefactors. A bad (unjust) law, it has been said, will be violated and rejected by the people. Or, fall into desuetude (a fancy French word borrowed from Latin).
Ask China. Or, better yet, that sidewalk vendor selling dirt-cheap DVDs.
On plagiarism, this centuries-old issue has always been an ongoing debate. To begin with, ours is a borrowed language, as are most European languages. Anatole France, a most respected author and Nobel Laureate in Literature said:
“When a thing has been said, and said well, have no scruple; take it and copy it.”
Now, perhaps therein lies the “problem.” M.V.P. still has scruples, or what some theologians would refer to as a delicate conscience.
There’s Honore de Balzac, another famous French novelist-playwright who graphically observed: “There is nothing original; all is reflected light.”
Or, here’s a sampling of what some other great men had to say:
Goethe was heard to have said there would be little left of him if he were to discard what he owed to others.
Is the painter a plagiarist because he sets his palette to nature? – Benjamin West.
Our best thought comes from others. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. – Albert Einstein
Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers. – Wendell Philipps
As early as 170 BC, the ancient Roman writer Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) had already wisely observed: “Nothing is said which has not been said before.”
But, then again, try telling that to a delicate soul like M.V.P. Now, why am I humming “Starry, starry night…” – Atty. James D. Lansang
One thing I hear quite frequently...
when corruptions are uncovered & blown wide open - SHE, through her spokesman G.O. (come to think of it, he was actually and supposedly an activist BEFORE and a PHIL-AM at that while holding a very sensitive position in the gov't.) and deputies (e.g. Rep A.V. - another SIPSIP)... hawk back... PROVE IT! SHE & FG (the A's & the M's) know the system so well, they can always wiggle their way out politically. They have all the numbers at their finger tips. SHE has her own court - SC & CA, her very own DOJ! Her allies promulgate laws full of loop holes to serve as their exits. PROVE IT! To hell with delicadeza, kapal muks, unconscionability... PROVE IT! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When I heard about the commencement speech by MVP, I was really amazed by the power of Information Technology... The reaction was instant. We've so many well informed and intelligent people around... With such prowess, our nation should rise to the 1st world level. |
Kuya CECIL, for someone mostly based in the U.S. you sure sound all fired up politically. I tried to sound as apolitical as possible, in and of itself a no-brainer. Incidentally, you must know abt "TurnItIn" - a plagiarism -detecting software. But, as I tried to point out, MVP merely has to sneeze and the whole world blesses him.
MVP for President? |
Somebody said that nothing is wrong with borrowing somebody else's idea so long as you improve on it. Or better yet, someone said to justify such an act, "I don't call it plagiarism. I call it research." Take your pick. There are many ways of looking at the Most Valuable Player. Who are we to judge indeed. There is nothing new under the moon.
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avilacharles wrote on Apr 10, '10
To many historians, Jeems, the brouhaha on intellectual property as exempified by US suits before the WTO against China and others, sound funny now because for more than a hundred years, the US had strong intellectual property laws that only protected its citizens and residents but not foreigners and foreign products. These latter were explicitly excluded from protection by American law. Most British work, for instance, was blatantly pirated in the US – yes, blatantly and legally. As long as the work of a foreigner was not legally protected, it was common property.
Then, later, after more than a hundred years, foreign authors and inventors could also obtain American copyright protection. But it was expensive. Like now, so was it then – pirated copies are always significantly cheaper than “original”. Thus, there was little incentive to buy “legitimate products.” The Berne convention of 1887 was signed by most of the world – affording international copyright protection. But, as before, the US would again take its time – over another 100 years (1988) till it signed the convention. Developing countries outside amnesiac Philippines do not too easily forget this fact – for their own good: countries such as Taiwan, China, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Korea, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. They seem to be quite aware of the teaching of the American philosopher, Thomas Jefferson: “That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.” How did it come about then that Americans started preaching to the world about the moral philosophy of intellectual property ownership and the evils of piracy: at the GATT, the NAFTA, the APEC, everywhere – and now the WTO? Quite simply, the US was transforming itself from an industrial economy to an information one. Intellectual property had become its new basis of comparative advantage. There was a new resentment of the world’s increasing capacity to freely access and use (“pirate”) intellectual works and new technologies. The value protected by Intellectual Property in the world economy had risen to a staggering hundreds of billions of dollars – and is still growing. Clearly, Intellectual Property provides the key to the distribution of wealth and power and access in the information society. To the USA, intellectual property rights must be protected because of their humble belief that America is the most creative place on the planet. And this seems true in the computer industry and in the pharmaceutical, movie and recording industries. America correctly believes that, legally or illegally, all other countries on earth benefit from US creativity in these fields. Some American quarters now caution against this US-Is-No.1 argument because, they warn, “If we lose the upper hand, we will be disadvantaged by the very intellectual property laws we have designed”. According to the advocates of this view, it is wiser to see that the exchange of new knowledge is more important than immediate royalties. In the end, they believe, such free flow of ideas will make piracy moot. In the past, prophets and social philosophers fulminated against those “who covet farm after neighboring farm”. Today the covetousness is applied to the realm of elusive ideas: appropriating in an exclusivist and absolutist sense music, painting, drawings, motion pictures, sound recordings, computer software and even genetic codes. The past practice of first occupancy of land as a dubious moral justification for absolute ownership of a common resource now leads to first registration of patents and copyrights. And these new acts of ownership get to be extended for longer and longer periods. Sorry for the longish ruminations. I get carried away on this topic, as my classmates know. |
avilacharles wrote on Apr 10, '10
Jeems, pahabol:more than fifty years ago, a former Justice of the Provisional Supreme Court of Shanghai, John C.H.Wu, told law students that “one cannot really know the human law without taking account of its sources.” Much earlier on, the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo had said that implicit in every legal decision is the philosophy of the origin and aim of law. “Neither lawyer nor judge, pressing forward along one line or retreating along another, is conscious at all times that it is philosophy which is impelling him to the front or to the rear.”
What moral philosophy then can we find behind the legal subject of Intellectual Property? When people “own” ideas – the ownership of these ideas is referred to as “Intellectual Property.” People own clothes, cars, houses and even land. Morally speaking, they can only own these things privately in order to use them properly. Ownership is understood as a means for the sake of an end, which is the proper use of things. It is morally acceptable to say that certain things cannot be properly used if they are not privately owned. “Owning” normally means “exclusive use or control”. “Owning” ideas, then, would mean “exclusive use or control” of ideas – which clearly does not make as much or the same sense as when you apply the term ownership to physical objects. The essential difference is this. Physical objects can only be used by one person at a time. But ideas can be copied over and over with the person who had the “original” idea still retaining full use of it. More than one person can use an idea – a poem, a mathematical formula, a tune – without reducing other people’s use of the idea. Shoes, clothes, houses, cars, toothbrushes, ideas, air, water, land – what is the difference in the ownership of each of them by would-be property owners? The philosophical principle is clear: the extent of the right of ownership over anything must be defined by the nature of the thing owned. And, as the American Thomas Jefferson already pointed out: what is clearly in the nature of ideas is their characteristic to be freely and inevitably shared. My ideas are only my own if I do not share them. Once shared, they cannot be returned and enforcing my so-called property right is impossible. The famous advertisement put out by the optical media administration is clearly morally fallacious when it adduces various kinds of property as being similar to I.P. given that, by their very nature, they are not. Some statutes currently imposed by the state may be legal as a work of a humanly frail legislature vulnerable to U.S. imperial pressures but they may not necessarily be ethical or moral. Some copyright and patent laws should be regarded as unethical when they are used to abridge the freedom of using published information. Using published information does not cause harm to anyone. Abridging such freedom of use harms the progress of science and the arts and abridges the freedom of speech, expression and the freedom to think freely. The freedom to acquire knowledge, store, process and spread that knowledge, as we see fit, is clearly abridged by certain copyright and patent laws. So we say these laws are immoral because their aim is frankly to strive to make a scarce resource of something that can be truly abundant. If my freedom to obtain knowledge, store and process that knowledge, and then spread that knowledge as I see fit is abridged – as in fact it is by some intellectual property laws – then I am forced to re-invent the wheel rather than copy and use or modify existing information. Thus, for instance, if I publish a program for drug designs, and claim all intellectual property rights over it, you wouldn’t even begin to do research on the program legally without licensing it from me. The freedom of others to even think about what my program is and/or to improve its workings is thereby seriously abridged. This very term, Intellectual Property, derived from the landed estate metaphor. Eighteenth century England was seeing the commons rapidly giving way to private property in land – land which, since time immemorial, had been considered the essential component of the public domain, the koina, or the commons. The metaphor, therefore, places accent on appropriation rather than its basis, which may have been creation, for instance. “People are entitled to the results of their labor.” Yes, but first of all, we must recognize that more than anything else, intellectual products are social products. Their value is not due to the work of a single laborer or small group but is now clearly more and more a common human heritage. |
avilacharles wrote on Apr 10, '10
Finally finally, Jeems - in the case of MVP, I guess all you can advice him is the old line: if you can't be good, be careful - or, better in reverse, if you can't be careful, be good: if you can't be a Manglapus or a de la Costa at an Ateneo commencement, why not just be MVP? There is a lot to be said, after all, for a man who can persuade Indonesian capital to leave that needy country and prefer instead to develop neighboring Philippines.
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Addendum:
U.S.A. is THE CAPITALIST country... hence, intellectual property, royalties, trade secrets, patents,copyrights, have all their pecuniary interests... IT'S ALL BUSINESS!. Could it be due to American (?) influence e.g. Holywood, Awards, even Nobel prize, among others, have all been highly COMMERCIALIZED and CAPITALIZED. Morally (hardly considered)... it is extreme selfishness and amor propio, and pride (obsession for credit & recognition) ... Who cares about "sharing" one's ideas, inventions, discoveries, if there's no ROI, no credit, no recognition... for being the "creator", the "inventor", the "discoverer". IT'S ALL BUSINESS. |
Now I know that discussions on intellectual property rights can also stir mixed notions and emotions. I read a story about a kid who got into trouble. When asked if God made everything, he replied "No!". . . he believes that most things are made in China.
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Longish ruminations like this are always welcome. It is like viewing two sparring popular blackbelters from the nosebleed section of the arena. It is similar to attending an instant interesting seminar by an expert panel of resource persons in the comfort of our homes. Tangible or not, these works of art or goods will always be vulnerable to piracy or stealing simply because of convenience and it is lucrative business with hardly any effective safeguards. It is tantamount to trying to stop drug dealing or hweteng. While it may not be impossible, it is extremely difficult.
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elmersarmiento wrote on Apr 11, '10
PLDT, Smart, Meralco, NLEX, TV5, Fort Bonifacio, Burger King, Manila North Harbor, etc. etc. MVP runs these companies like an emperor.
On the charge of plagiarism based on some excerpts picked out from Oprah, Conan and Obama speeches, I guess this is forgivable. Taking the blame and apologising for the incident is an honorable thing to do. I doff my hat to this man. On the other hand, are his investments just for the ROI of his backers and profits for his companies? He's running companies that are key to the Philippine economy. Leaving these control to one man is extremely dangerous. Note that the capital came from sources in Hongkong and Indonesia. We should be forewarned. Is there a hidden agenda? Just asking. |
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