National Public Radio

I'm pleased that National Public Radio in the US has picked up the story on plagiarism in Germany. One of my new readers posted a link on the Heidelberg page with a link to a song that he composed about someone plagiarizing from him.

One of the other persons interviewed in Germany is a retired German professor who states:

[...] that people without position and little money are using such plagiarism claims to become famous.

Um, let's run that through the logic analyzer,  shall we? The activists are pseudonymous. That means that most are not known by their civil name (although two of us are, and strangely enough, we are both professors). So you just don't know if the rest have a position or not. And their bank accounts are not (yet) available for perusal on Facebook. I'm also puzzled by the consequent -- how does one become famous if one is pseudonymous?

For those who read German: have a look around the Schavanplag site. "Robert Schmidt" has been doing some cleaning up. And s/he's not doing it to get famous. Really. And the VroniPlag Wiki site is up to 34 cases and still going strong.