Earlier this week, the Supreme Court of Canada heard the appeal
of
Cojocaru (Guardian Ad Litem) v. British Columbia Women's
Hospital and Health Center. This case has widely been
publicized as the judicial plagiarism case. In this case, the trial
judge essentially copied large portions of the plaintiff's
written argument. As many journalists have noted, this copying was
done "without attribution."
With respect to the media, I'm not sure the term
"plagiarism" adequately covers the issue before the
Courts. In one case, an online news article about the case was
accompanied with a poll asking whether the reader has ever
plagiarized anything. This just confuses the issue!
The issue before the Supreme Court of Canada is not, at its
core, an issue of wrongful appropriation of the plaintiff's
argument. It's also not an issue of properly attributing the
source; nor is it a copyright issue.
