June 6, 2015
Mr. Alberto de la Cruz
Managing Editor
Babalú Blog
Mr. de la Cruz:
I am writing in response to your libelous article of June 5
entitled “Publisher of Purdue University professor’s book on José Martí cuts check
for plagiarized images.” The text of the article includes scans of a check
issued by the University of Texas at Austin, publishers of my most recent book,
to one Antonio de la Cova, instructor at the University of South Carolina. In
the email from Dr. de la Cova that you include in your article, he cites said
check as proof of my “theft”, of having “plagiarized” his work. Dr. de la Cova
further crows about his (no doubt for him substantial) payday as a commenter to
your article.
I will contact Dr. de la Cova separately. This
letter is for you, both in your capacity as Managing Editor of Babalú Blog and
as author of the above-referenced article. Had you titled said article slightly
differently—had you, say, included the qualifier “alleged” or “accused,” rather
than describing the images in question outright as “plagiarized”—you would of
course not be liable in this matter, since the rest of your article consists of
a one-sentence introduction to Dr. de la Cova’s scanned check and email. Had
you done that, you would be guilty only of bad judgment in allowing someone
else to post libelous statements on your blog without knowing the full story.
But you did not include any such qualifier in your
title. And so you too are now compromised by Mr. de la Cova’s reckless
defamation of my professional reputation as a writer and scholar.
I think that Dr. de la Cova must have withheld this
information from you, because I believe—I would hope—that had you also seen the
letter to Dr. de la Cova from the Press you would not have published your
article. In other words, I want to believe that you would not deliberately
publish a defamatory article that you suspect may be false. I cannot believe
that any responsible Managing Editor would knowingly place himself and his
organization in legal jeopardy by doing so.
And so, on the assumption that you have acted without full
knowledge regarding this matter, my purpose in writing you is twofold. In what
remains of this letter I will: (1) explain to you why my use of the documents
in question does not, and could never, constitute plagiarism; and (2) offer a
way to reasonably resolve this matter in order to avoid further action on my
part, as well as by the University of Texas Press and Purdue University, whom
you also libel by including them in the title of your article.
Every college and university publishes a statement defining
plagiarism, which they universally consider a serious act of academic
misconduct. At Purdue it is the individual colleges (and some departments) that
issue their own discipline-specific guidelines, which the Office of the Dean of
Students neatly summarizes in the following statement:
Plagiarism is a special kind of academic dishonesty in which one
person steals another person’s ideas or words and falsely presents them as the
plagiarist’s own product. This is most likely to occur in the following ways:
(1) using the exact language of someone else without the use of
quotation marks and without giving proper credit to the author
(2) presenting
the sequence of ideas or arranging the material of someone else even though
such is expressed in one’s own words, without giving appropriate acknowledgment
(3) submitting a document written by someone else but representing it as one’s own
(3) submitting a document written by someone else but representing it as one’s own
Purdue’s University Copyright Office further clarifies:
Copyright
infringement and plagiarism are two different issues. Copyright is a
federal law that protects original works from being copied and distributed
without the author’s permission unless one of the exceptions applies.
Plagiarism is passing off someone else’s work as one’s own or lack of
attribution. There is no federal or state plagiarism law but there can
certainly be severe repercussions for plagiarizing.
Copyright infringement example: Incorporating an entire poem by Maya
Angelou into a published work without her permission. The poem is
property attributed to Ms. Angelou.
Plagiarism example: Using a line or even an entire poem by Maya Angelou
in a paper and not attributing the poem to the author or citing the
source. It would appear that the poem is the creation of the person
writing the paper and not Maya Angelou.
We might neatly summarize these texts this way: Plagiarism
is the theft of another’s intellectual work as one’s own, while copyright
infringement is the copying or distribution of works owned by someone else.
Dr. de la Cova’s claim of plagiarism stems from my use of
two documents: Manuel Mantilla’s 1885 death certificate (p. 199 of my book) and
Maria Mantilla’s 1880 birth certificate (p. 200). I found these two documents
at www.latinamericanstudies.org,
a website created in 1997 and still apparently operated by him. In the book I
attribute each of those documents to their respective sources: the City of New
York and the City of Brooklyn. Both are public
documents, available to anyone who wishes to ask for them. Dr. de la Cova
does not, could not possibly, own those documents, any more than I could own
your birth certificate by acquiring a copy from your place of birth, or on
Ancestry.com. Let me make this as plain as I can for you: Neither Manuel Mantilla’s death certificate nor Maria Mantilla’s birth
certificate belong to Dr. de la Cova.
Thus, according to the definitions of plagiarism and
copyright infringement I have cited in this letter—really, by any definition of
these—I am guilty of nothing more than a bit of expedience, because using the
scans from Dr. de la Cova’s website saved me an additional trip to New York City.
I want you to understand this with complete clarity: By any reasonable definition of the terms, I am not guilty of either
plagiarism or copyright infringement. And again, this is for one simple
reason: Dr. de la Cova can make no legal
claim to ownership of documents in the public domain simply by posting them on
a website. Even if he was the first to publish them.
But for at least one of those documents Dr. de la Cova
cannot make that claim either. You see, a far more accomplished scholar than
either myself or Dr. de la Cova, the late and eminent Dr. Carlos Ripoll, first
published Manuel Mantilla's
Certificate of Death in "Martí: La esposa y la amante," published in
Diario las Américas on Sunday, May 15, 1988. That particular article, as well
as the reproduction of the Certificate of Death, also appeared in Ripoll's
book La vida íntima y secreta de José Martí (1995), which you will find at:
But you don’t have to take
my word for it. On p. 12, footnote 3 of the Anuario del Centro de Estudios Martianos
12 (1989), we find this (emphasis mine):
Carlos
Ripoll, de quien se ha dicho, con razón, que su habilidad para encontrar datos
significativos de la vida de Martí es superada por su tenaz vocación de
traicionar el legado del héroe de nuestra América, publicó el 15 de mayo de 1988 — y en periódico afín a su condición
de contrarevolucionario: Diario de las
Américas, editado en Miami — el
facsímil del certificado de defunción de Manuel Mantilla."
So you see, even
Dr. Ripoll's enemies in Cuba agree that he was the first to reproduce
Mantilla's death certificate. Dr. de la Cova either does not know this, or he
found them in Ripoll’s writings himself and scanned them to his own website.
I have not yet been able to
locate Maria Mantilla’s birth certificate among Ripoll’s publications, but I am
nearly certain that he published that document first as well. But of course
that is a side issue, since publishing the documents first would give Dr. Ripoll no
more claim to ownership than it does Dr. de la Cova.
I could continue,
but I trust that by now you take my point: No plagiarism, no infringement, no
“theft” of any kind has occurred, because I have stolen neither Dr. de la
Cova’s words or ideas—or anything else to which he can honestly claim
ownership.
I have no reason to doubt that you published your libelous
June 5 article in the full belief that Dr. de la Cova’s claims were true. I
also genuinely believe, now that you have read my lengthy and detailed reply to
his accusations, that you will realize it is you who have wronged me.
I am not an attorney, but in my professional opinion as a
scholar, in your June 5 article you committed libel against me and, without grounds or provocation, defamed my character and
threatened my professional reputation. Although having to deal with your libel
has caused me a great deal of mental and emotional anguish, and wasted much
time that I could have spent more productively, I bear you no ill will. Now
that I have shown you that Dr. de la Cova’s claims are in fact false, I will
extend to you in good faith the opportunity to withdraw this libelous article
and publish a clear and unambiguous retraction. Do that, and I will consider
the matter between myself and you, and Babalu Blog, closed.
You need to understand, however, that I cannot permit your defamatory article to remain, its
presence every day spreading its false claims about my professionalism, my
honesty, and my character to more and more people. If you choose to stand by your
June 5 article after receipt of this letter, and allow it to remain on your
website, I am prepared to take any and all actions available to me to protect
myself, my character, my reputation, and my career from this defamatory assault.
You have my permission to publish
this letter on your blog if you so desire, but only in its entirety.
Sincerely yours,
Alfred J. López
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Department of English
Purdue University
