Saturday, January 13, 2007

More on the plagiarism of Joe Biden

The Wichita Eagle [WE] blog brought up the old charges of plagiarism against Joe Biden, who is considering another presidential run: But nothing has changed about the charges of plagiarism of speeches and law school work that dogged his 1988 bid.

IPBiz notes that one of the commenters on the WE blog cited Wikipedia: "Unaware of appropriate standards for legal briefs at the beginning of his legal training, Biden used a single footnote rather than multiple citations required to cite five pages from a legal article. Both Syracuse University Law School and the Delaware State Bar Association cleared Biden of plagiarism charges." [IPBiz: will the accused at Ohio University make out as well?]

The commenter did NOT mention the issues during the 1988 campaign, which transpired long after Biden was a naive law student: Biden was a U.S. presidential aspirant who in 1987 was exposed for having plagiarized the speeches of some other politicians, such as British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock.

***
Of Wikipedia, IP Law & Business noted: In August, [2006] when the Patent and Trademark Office acknowledged that it had taken Wikipedia off its list of acceptable research sources, the surprise was not that the Web site had been banished, but that examiners had been using it at all. (...) In comments made to BusinessWeek in September, patent commissioner John Doll said that Wikipedia had been used for background only, and not as a basis for accepting or rejecting applications. (...)
The PTO's deputy director of public affairs, Brigid Quinn, says that the back-and-forth nature of the patent process allows applicants to respond if they think an examiner has used a resource inappropriately: "There are a lot of safeguards; they get at least 14 bites at the apple."

1 Comments:

Blogger Lawrence B. Ebert said...

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS on Feb. 1:

Yet Biden's Obama comment also served as a reminder of his tendency to talk too much and get himself in trouble. He was forced to drop his bid for the 1988 presidential nomination after he was caught plagiarizing British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock. Last year he said that "you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent."

7:35 AM  

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