Plagiarism Should be Penalized on DDO

Section headings underlined, opponent quotes in bold, source quotes in italics. First I shall crush Hect's case, then present my own. Rebuttals: "I have thoroughly read the DDO privacy policy and terms of use, no where does it say one cannot plagiarize" 1. Nowhere is one word. 1. Ignorance that particular intentionally unethical behavior is illegal, is no defense. 2. Failing at literacy to cause such lapse, is also no defense. The Terms of Use which Hect claims to have "thoroughly read" contains the following highlights; from the Code of Conduct "Will not impersonate any person or entity," and from Proprietary Rights "All material you post on Debate.org, including debate arguments… becomes the property of Debate.org" [1]. Plagiarism is impersonating the author/owner of intellectual property, and here it is attempting to unlawfully cede ownership to Debate.org. "under what authority does my opponent claim to penalise people for? The answer is none." 1. Penalize is spelled with a Z. 2. Rather than listing the many qualifications, I will simply cite the official How to Vote guide's statement on conduct awards "Improper conduct includes… bad sportsmanlike behavior" [2]. Plagiarism is synonymous with such obviously bad things as piracy and theft, it is most clearly bad sportsmanlike behavior, perhaps more than any other action one can take within a debate. 3. Just to hammer it in a little more, Airmax1227, the official moderator for the site has openly stated "Voters should acknowledge [plagiarism] and the person responsible for it should lose the debate" [3]. "thought provoking challenging debates" 1. I never knew copy/pasting was a challenge, or indeed thought provoking. 2. The implied danger is invalid, as no one has been shown to be making up their own rules. 3. The site would however become a nightmare if instead of people trying to come up with new arguments, they defaulted to plagiarizing winning arguments never to actually put forward their own thoughts again. "I felt needed no reference as it was not an argument that asserted any facts it only required one to think about what I was saying." Were it actually your words that would be the case, however instead you decided to copy/paste what someone else wrote. "Should everyone who has used the 'flying spaghetti monster' argument cite Bobby Henderson" 1. Please denote questions with question marks. 2. If by argument you mean not writing their own text, but just copy/pasting from Bobby Henderson, than a firm yes. 3. Also yes to the remaining questions on if people should cite quotations, as opposed to claiming authorship. Argument: In short this is an intellectual site for a mental sport. Were this boxing and you forfeited fights only to send someone else in to take your place, you would be the laughing stock of the sport if you claimed those victories. If the point of a debate is to win, than it is with the restrictions of winning by your own merits, not someone elses, and not by cheating. Were we to switch to a standard of plagiarism being acceptable, why think when you can just copy/paste an already winning argument from say Mikal [4], at which point why should anyone vote on the debate, when such already happened when the argument was originally put forward? In fact why bother with a user base, when the Debate.org computers can generate unique numbers to the Mikal debates and repost them again and again, and even copy the vote RFDs previously cast. Rather than going down that dark road, we have the conduct penalty to assign as a simple way to discourage such obvious bad behavior as plagiarism. It's common sense. To any argument against penalizing conduct over it due to it not being spelled out clearly enough in the Terms of Service, well forfeiting isn't either we still punish that. Sources: [1] http://www.debate.org... [2] http://www.debate.org... [3] http://www.debate.org... [4] http://www.debate.org...