Hey kids! It's okay to plagiarize!

Hey kids! It's okay to plagiarize!

WASHINGTON – A Democratic group has unearthed a bit of inspirational autobiography on Senator Scott Brown's official website that was lifted verbatim from Elizabeth Dole's site, language that originated in a campaign speech. In a message to students, the Massachusetts senator uses the exact words as remarks delivered by the former North Carolina senator at her campaign kickoff in 2002.[...] "I was raised to believe that there are no limits to individual achievement and no excuses to justify indifference," said the message from Brown, which was removed later yesterday. "From an early age, I was taught that success is measured not in material accumulations, but in service to others. I was encouraged to join causes larger than myself, to pursue positive change through a sense of mission, and to stand up for what I believe."

Why reinvent the wheel when you can come across as so much more genuine and sincere and committed to public service by using someone else's words . Particularly when you're trying to recruit students to come be interns for you.

So the broken home in which he was raised that led him to take his clothes off to pay for school was where he learned there was nothing he couldn't achieve. But not where he learned that cheating by copying someone else's work is, well, cheating. Right. No wonder somebody got suspicious. Here's screen grabs from the pages.

Sen. Dole's web page

Sen. Brown's web page

It turns out that it wasn't just this one page on his site, either.

Another page on Brown's website also seem to have language lifted from Dole as well, including the introduction message on the "Intern Program" web page. Brown writes, "Senator Brown has long encouraged young people to become involved in the political process. As a public servant, he strongly believes that public service is a noble thing to do, and a wonderful way to give back." A screengrab of Dole's intern program page shows verbatim language used to introduce the program with a few variances—for example, Dole's page referred to the former senator as "a public servant for over 35 years." Brown's spokesman John Donnelly told POLITICO Thursday morning he couldn’t comment on the language used on the senator's intern page for the time being.

Brown's staff, however, did tell the Globe in the original story that the plagiarism wasn't plagiarism but "the result of a technical error." The technical error being they accidentally copied and pasted whole pages from a former Senator's Web page into Brown's. Easy technical error to make. It could happen to anyone who doesn't understand how copy and paste works, I'm sure.