Harvard Magazine discusses Zakaria plagiarism

The story in Harvard Magazine began

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS EXPERT Fareed Zakaria, Ph.D. ’93, LL.D. ’12, the principal speaker at last June’s Commencement, was suspended Friday, at least temporarily, by both Time magazine and CNN for plagiarism after he used uncredited text in his most recent column for Time, datelined August 20.

and delved into a separate self-plagiarism issue related to the commencement address:

Zakaria was taken to task in the media earlier this summer when news reports noted similarities between his Harvard Commencement address and the speech he had delivered at Duke barely two weeks earlier—a case of borrowing only from himself.

Although the Harvard Magazine is minimizing the harm of self-plagiarism, there are third party victims:

Consider the matter of Walter Wendler, who copied material he created while at Texas A&M into a proposal while he was employed at SIU. There are third party victims in such a case: Texas A&M who paid Wendler for the job and had its "paid-for" work product re-cycled, and SIU who paid Wendler for the same job, and got re-cycled merchandise. A similar kind of problem can appear in validity opinions on patents. One client pays for an opinion, and a later client, seeking advice on the same patent, might get the same opinion, re-cycled, but yet pay full price. The text from answers.com separately does not get into the odd case of Ward Churchill, who self-plagiarized but under a pseudonym, of course praising the work of Ward Churchill. Here, also, there are third party victims, who believed that an independent party, other than Ward Churchill, was praising Churchill, when in fact it was Churchill. [from IPBiz in August 2009]