Intellectual property lawyer loses papers for … plagiarism

Although most of what Alanis Morissette sang about in her hit song “Ironic” wasn’t irony at all, had she included a line or two about Angela Adrian she would have nailed it.

Adrian is an expert in intellectual property law, a former editor of the International Journal of Intellectual Property Management, a legal scholar whose resume boasts more degrees than a protractor. According to this bio:

Dr Angela Adrian is a dual qualified lawyer in Louisiana and the UK. Her specialisms include Intellectual Property, Information Technology, International Trade, and Criminal Law. She has two Masters degrees with distinction in Business & Management (Schiller International University) as well as in Commercial Law (University of Aberdeen). She obtained her Juris Doctorate at Loyola University, New Orleans. Dr Adrian published her PhD from Queen Mary, University of London as a monograph entitled “Law and Order in Virtual Worlds: Exploring Avatars, their Ownership and Rights”. Currently, she is Chief Knowledge Officer of Icondia Ltd, an images rights company, co-author of the 4th edition of “Intellectual Property: Text and Essential Cases” (Australia), and Editor of the International Journal of Intellectual Property Management.

She’s also a serial plagiarist.

Adrian was author of a 2007 paper in Computer Law & Security Review titled “I™: Avatars as trade marks.” Per the abstract:

Virtual worlds may be the future of e-commerce. The game designers who created these thriving virtual worlds have discovered a much more attractive way to use the Internet: through an avatar. This avatar is your identity. It will be your trade mark. Trade marks, more than other species of intellectual property, are one step further from tangible property. Stephen Carter has called trade marks “owning what does not exist.” Every kind of intellectual property requires participants, users, to acquire value. What makes trade marks different is that they require participants to acquire meaning. This article deals with the complex problem of creating intangible property interests (i.e., trade marks) in what does not exist except in virtual reality. How do two parties with competing interests (game developers and the players) work to create trade marks within pre-trade marked worlds?

Evidently, however, some of those words already existed in the form Adrian chose to present them:

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.

The author has been found by an Ethical Committee appointed to consider the matter to have plagiarized parts of a paper by Steven Wilf [Cardozo Arts & Ent. LJ, (1998–1999) 17, 1–46; http://cardozoaelj.com/wp-content/uploads/Journal%20Issues/Volume%2017/Issue%201/Wilf.pdf].

One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication in CLSR is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. Whilst the author denies intentional wrongdoing this article represents an abuse of the scientific publishing system and the scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter.

Ditto for a 2006 article by Adrian in the same journal, “The Pirate Bay deep-sixed,” which argued that:

While some of these liability theories, particularly those that reach communications from one nation that are to be received in other nations, may seem an affront to the traditional territoriality principle, so too is massive unlicensed distribution of copyright protected material by parties who are themselves indifferent to territorial boundaries. As Grokster and Kazaa demonstrate, for some legal actors, attempting to stop the flow of massive amounts of unlicensed distribution of copyright protected material may prove to be more important than the niceties of copyright’s territoriality principle. The difficulty with this approach is that it has the potential to impose on every other nation a ‘balance’ struck with US economic and technological conditions in mind. This policy would seem to lead to greater freedom on the part of the developers of dual-use technologies to act in ways that facilitate greater circulation of copyright protected works. Without geographical filtering, such works are likely to reach nations that see the balance between technological freedom and copyright protection differently.

According to the retraction notice:

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.

The author has been found by an Ethical Committee appointed to consider the matter to have plagiarized parts of a paper by Graeme W. Austin [Santa Clara Computer & High Technology Journal, Vol. 22, p. 577, 2006, Arizona Legal Studies Discussion Paper No. 06-08, Victoria University of Wellington Legal Research Paper No. 3/2013; http://ssrn.com/abstract=861224].

One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication in CLSR is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. Whilst the author denies intentional wrongdoing this article, nevertheless, represents an abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter.

Adrian, who has not responded to our requests for comment, also lost a 2010 paper in the Journal of International Commercial Law and Technology titled “Could a small town in Romania bring Australia to its cyber-knees? not if they accede to the EU Convention on Cybercrime”:

The author has plagiarised some sections of the articles from various sources, notably from the published work of Alana Maurushat, “Australia’s succession to the Cybercrime Convention: is the Convention still relevant in combatting crime in the era of Botnets and Obfuscation Crime Tools?” UNSW Law Journal Vol 33(2) 2010 Forum (Australia’s Accession to the Cyber-crime Convention) pp 431-47

Plagiarism obviously is a serious affront to a civil society. We think the words of one legal scholar put it best:

An autonomy-based theory of identity protection incorporates the important insight that some forms of property are more essential to personhood than others (Radin, 1982). Moreover, property in persona – ‘the inherent right of every human being to control the commercial use of his or her Identity’ – deserves a particular form of protection in our legal system (McCarthy, 2007). The current U.S. theory of the right of publicity is as a traditional intellectual property right (Westfall & Landau, 2005). If one focuses on individual autonomy, then the inclusion of both the personal and purely economic elements of the right can be included. This, then, enables a particular form of intellectual property, incorporating a ‘sui generis mixture of personal rights, property rights, and rights under the law of unfair competition.’(Hoffman, 1980)

The legal scholar: Angela Adrian.

Now isn’t THAT ironic!