A Chinese university press has printed course materials from Yale’s free online classes. Yale has complained, okay, but the incident reminds me of something Stan Ulam attributed to John von Neumann: “It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you are willing to give someone else the credit.”
Via Andrew Gelman.
Who cares? Yale was not going to make any money from these materials and substantial effort was invested into making a tangible product out of them (i.e. translating them into Chinese and using physical resources to print them).
Yale was going to be payed just not in money. The payment they requested was recognition. Clearly someone added something to it for the Chinese market but that is beside the point.
Chinese plagiarize something? No, all they have to do is make a few changes and it is no longer plagiary. I was shocked when I saw the 2001 “Beijing Bicycle”. It was such an out and out copy of De Sica’s classic, “Bicycle Thief” that it was unbelievable that the director would have the guts to put it on the international market. All he had to do was say that he had adapted it from De Sica’s movie, and that would have been ok. But I have never seen him say that in any place….and I looked.
It reminds me of another old saying.
There was a firm that used to sell a kit of body parts so that you could make a Ford Escort look like a Porsche 911. When Ferdinand Porsche was asked if he was bothered about this, he said. “No, I but would be really worried if there was a kit to make a Porsche look like a Ford”.
A variant of the von Neumann quote, “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit,” is allegedly one of Ronald Reagan’s favorites.
I think he meant the sentiment for others, though, since a sign featuring these words is, without a hint of irony, available for purchase in the gift shop of the vast and wildly expensive hilltop shrine Reagan built to himself in Simi Valley, California.
https://tinyurl.com/RRDeskSign
(https://www.reaganfoundation.org/store/prod-_Ronald_Reagan_Quote_Desk_Plaque-1194.aspx)