MANILA, Philippines - Thirty seven individuals, mostly academics and bloggers, on Tuesday filed an ethics complaint against Senate Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III over plagiarized speeches on the Reproductive Health bill.
The 22-page complaint was filed before the Senate Ethics and Privileges Committee chaired by Senate Minority Leader Alan Peter Cayetano. The complainants were led by Dr. Sylvia Estrada-Claudio of the University of the Philippines' Center for Women, Antonio Contreras of the De La Salle University College of Liberal Arts, and Ateneo de Manila Political Science Department director Lisandro Claudio.
The complaint said that Sotto violated the Intellectual Property Code of Philippines, or RA 8293, and the Senate's own ethics rules.
The group formally accused Sotto of copying from blogs and writings of American blogger Sarah Pope, Marlon C. Ramirez, and Peter Engelman. He was also accused of lifting from the late US Senator Robert F. Kennedy's 1966 "Day of Affirmation" speech.
The complaint said that "to this date, respondent Sotto has not owned up to the nine (9) instances of copying without attributions included in the three parts of his en contra speech delivered on August 13 and 15, and September 5, 2012.
"Neither has he, since then, given proper attribution to any of these authors from whom these works were copied,” the complaint added.
The complaint also took Sotto to task for his insistence that plagiarism is not a crime in the Philippines. It quoted then Associate Justice, now Chief Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno, in her dissenting opinion in an earlier charge of plagiarism against Associate Justice Mariano C. Del Mundo.
"The infringement of copyright necessitates a framework for characterizing the expression of ideas as property. It thus turns on a question of whether there exists resultant harm in a form which is economically quantifiable. Plagiarism, on the other hand, covers a much wider range of acts. In defining copy right infringement, Laurie Stearns points out how ‘it is an offense independent from plagiarism, so that an action for violation of copyright – which may take on either a criminal and civil aspect, or even both – does not sufficiently remedy the broader injury inherent in plagiarism," Sereno said in her opinion as cited by the complainants. "Plagiarism, with its lack of attribution, severs the connection between the original author’s name and work. A plagiarist, by falsely claiming authorship of someone else’s material, directly assault the author’s interest in receiving credits."
Sotto has been under fire since August, when he first made the anti-RH speech in question, not only for having lifted passages from the American authors, but, more gravely, for allegedly having twisted the contexts of what they wrote, to suit his anti-RH stance.
He was then later revealed to have translated portions of a speech from the late Robert Kennedy without permission or attribution, a fact that Sotto has acknowledged but that he insists warrants no apology.
Earlier this week, the daughter of the former US senator, Kerry Kennedy, released a letter chastising Sotto for copying from her father's speech. Ms. Kennedy said she was particularly appalled that Sotto had used her father's words to support an anti-reproductive health stance, suggesting that this would have run counter to Sen. Kennedy's life and convictions.
Sotto insists that everything he has said on the Senate floor is privileged. Moreover, he has maintained that he sees nothing wrong with how he had borrowed thoughts, words, and findings from other people without attribution. He says he is ready to face his detractors and the ethics complaint lodged against him.
source: interaksyon.com
