It is a well known fact that public figures, especially the political leaders hire the services of ghost-writers to write their speeches and other public addresses, but it is always the public figures who get the credit for the content written by someone else. No doubt all such ghost-writer are suitably paid for the services they happily render, but does that mean all such ghost writers should not get credit for what is their brain child/intellectual property.
Well, by definition, they can no be acknowledged in a way other than money as definetely that political leader or anyone else would not need people to know someone else wrote his content. I think other than money, they can be rewarded generally. For example, websites like UpWork or Freelancer.com allows you to rate a freelancer once he does a job for you. Good writers usually receive high ratings and get known as that. But no one knows what exact jobs they did to preserve the secrecacy of the client.
Hi Ramseh again,
To take American politics, very few American presidents wrote their own speeches. Former President G. W. Bush, for instance, was not known to have authored a single one of his speeches. When he improvised, he was found to produce un-English enormities. However, most American presidents used the services of speechwriters, who are sometimes known by name and style to the public. People know them, and credit them for that if they are successful. I can't give you names now. So, I don't think that even when they are successful, speechwriters consider their speeches as their brain-child, because the contents do not really reflect their own ideas but state policy and party politics. I should suspect that they are happy to take the money and gladly and readily forsake their intellectual property on the speeches they author.
Hope this will help.
Hi Maalej and Ibrahim, Thanks for your reply, but the fundamental question still stays, doe ghost-writing amounts to plagiarism, even if the ghost-writers are suitably paid for it.
Dear Ramesh,
Sorry if your question has not been answered. Let me reason like this. Plagiarism involves two authors: a fake one appropriating the product of real one. Plagiarism in academia is not paid for, and occurs without the knowledge of the original source, with the hope that the "thief" would get away with it. So, if speechwriting is paid for, with speechwriters being nominated by presidents and presidents use speeechwriters' production with their consent, knowledge, and "complicity", therefore speechwriting is not plagiarism. Plagiarism is not being paid by those who rob you of your intellectual property with your own consent.
Hope you will find this convincing.
Maalej thanks for your elaborate explanation, but your reply raises a few more doubts, like ghost writing is itself an intellectual property and under the prevailing conditions, to whom this intellectual property belongs to. Second, if it is the question of paying the authors, then by that logic we pay for each book we own, does that mean we paid the original author for his creativity and so are we at the liberty to use it and discredit the original author.
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