Kitchen Radio on Plagiarism

I was the weekly guest on the Berlin "Kitchen Radio" on the topic of plagiarism. This is a podcast that has been produced by four German radio journalists for a couple of years.

They have some simple recording equipment and an interesting table microphone. They invite a guest to their kitchen, start the recorder, introduce everyone, and then just talk like as if we were having coffee together for an hour.

They said that in their "day jobs" they are only out for the sound bites, have just a few seconds to explain their topics. They wanted to experiment with simple in-depth interviews, but also to see how this informal format could work.

I found it relatively chaotic with four journalists asking the usual journalist questions all at once, so I often had the feeling of not having answered a question thoroughly. We got off on quite a number of tangents, but one of the journalists kept focusing the group, bringing us back to the topic of plagiarism.

They are proponents of Creative Commons, of the creative re-mix, and didn't really understand what all the fuss about plagiarism was about. I do feel that I was able to explain why authorship is so important in science.

Listening to the podcast I find it remarkably easy to listen to, much of what I felt was chaotic comes across well in the podcast. If you understand German and have an hour - listen in, the link is in the first paragraph!