Kathy Toner is concerned about the apparent lack of ethics in the training
industry. Kathy, I concur. I left that industry and dissociated myself
from it for that very reason. I worked for eight years with Wilson
Learning Corp. in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Our training
materials, then, carefully attributed all ideas to the sources we could
identify -- and we worked hard to identify them. We did it, I fear, not
so much from ethics as from the belief that naming respected sources
helped lend credibility to what we provided. We thought of ourselves as
packagers of others' ideas -- we could present these ideas in ways that
made them more useful to our audiences -- rather than creators of new
concepts.
However, we were almost alone in doing this. And, because we did not (in
my estimation) do it from an ethical perspective, we began to stop doing
it.
So, in my view, the short answers to your questions are as follows:
1. When is it ethical to use others' ideas and not attribute? Never.
2. Are you overreacting? Absolutely not (but, unfortunately, I fear that
you won't be able find any vendor who acts responsibly about their theft
of concepts and ideas.)
One final thought: We in the U.S., who are the most litigious society on
earth, have a fundamental confusion between "legal" and "ethical" (or
"right.") Just because something is not illegal does not make it ethical
or right. And the laws concerning plagiarism are very loose. In fact we
used to say, "You cannot steal an idea" by which we meant that ideas or
concepts were not legally protected, only their particular "expression"
was. This gave people "permission" to steal ideas, change a few words (or
turn a diagram over or upside down), then republish them as their own --
and not fear lawsuits. I would like us to hold ourselves to a higher
standard. Just because lawyers can't figure out how to protect a right
doesn't mean that we shouldn't protect it -- by refusing to participate in
unethical behavior.
As Mark Twain once wrote, "Always do right. This will gratify some people,
and astonish the rest."
--"John Gunkler" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>