Plagiarism.
People have discussed, debated and dissected the word too many times and in too many forums to count, but I can't tell you exactly what they said, can I? Maybe in my own words, I could. But all the words I know come from a big fat dictionary written by this intelligent man. Now, I can't say his name because one of you might tip him and his lawyer off that I'm stealing his words. (A humble request: Please don't. My life savings account for just Rs.4533.) I could,of course, cite a few references or sources, but then again, I don't have my own system of citation.
This first paragraph is what people call satire. It's something I learnt the definition of in 8th grade. It basically involves saying something really smart, but tricking people into believing you ate Beiber for breakfast. I'll get to the really smart thing I was trying to say. Plagiarism isn't just failing to put a quotation in quotation marks. It isn't easy to understand, and I bet we've all benefited from it at some point of our lives.
There are clear cases when people steal something verbatim from someone else, but more commonly we see people take something and make slight variations with it.
Take the great and much-beloved Shakespeare, for example.
He wrote a very famous play about a prince who attempts to avenge the murder of his father. Hamlet.
But then what about this?
"The Ur-Hamlet (the German prefix Ur- means "primordial") is the name given to a play mentioned as early as 1589, a decade before most scholars believe Shakespeare composed Hamlet. Several surviving references indicate that such a play was well-known throughout the decade of the 1590s, some time before the first published texts of Shakespeare's play (1603, 1604)."
Wikipedia: Ur Hamlet
What if all the characters in Hamlet were just turned into lions?
Wikipedia: The Lion King
Okay, in all fairness, the truth is that plagiarism is bad. If it weren't bad, so many people wouldn't be upset about it. We have this sacred notion of intellectual property and originality is synonymous with creative genius, so of course, it's a bad thing.
It's just that the lines between original and unoriginal are blurred. The line between plagiarized and inspired is different for different people. When people think plagiarism, they think theft. In my mind, the real crime is unoriginality, not theft. Unoriginality simply implies a lack of ability in developing novel thoughts, not malicious intent, while theft does.
Is ownership of words honestly a realistic standard?
In a world where books, Google and everything in between exist, sadly, I think not.
People have discussed, debated and dissected the word too many times and in too many forums to count, but I can't tell you exactly what they said, can I? Maybe in my own words, I could. But all the words I know come from a big fat dictionary written by this intelligent man. Now, I can't say his name because one of you might tip him and his lawyer off that I'm stealing his words. (A humble request: Please don't. My life savings account for just Rs.4533.) I could,of course, cite a few references or sources, but then again, I don't have my own system of citation.
This first paragraph is what people call satire. It's something I learnt the definition of in 8th grade. It basically involves saying something really smart, but tricking people into believing you ate Beiber for breakfast. I'll get to the really smart thing I was trying to say. Plagiarism isn't just failing to put a quotation in quotation marks. It isn't easy to understand, and I bet we've all benefited from it at some point of our lives.
There are clear cases when people steal something verbatim from someone else, but more commonly we see people take something and make slight variations with it.
Take the great and much-beloved Shakespeare, for example.
He wrote a very famous play about a prince who attempts to avenge the murder of his father. Hamlet.
But then what about this?
"The Ur-Hamlet (the German prefix Ur- means "primordial") is the name given to a play mentioned as early as 1589, a decade before most scholars believe Shakespeare composed Hamlet. Several surviving references indicate that such a play was well-known throughout the decade of the 1590s, some time before the first published texts of Shakespeare's play (1603, 1604)."
Wikipedia: Ur Hamlet
What if all the characters in Hamlet were just turned into lions?
Wikipedia: The Lion King
Does this account for plagiarism? Does Shakespeare's contribution to literature diminish? Is it better to authentically create something that just about anybody could, or to rewrite/remake something into a masterpiece? I think we would prefer the latter.
Okay, in all fairness, the truth is that plagiarism is bad. If it weren't bad, so many people wouldn't be upset about it. We have this sacred notion of intellectual property and originality is synonymous with creative genius, so of course, it's a bad thing.
It's just that the lines between original and unoriginal are blurred. The line between plagiarized and inspired is different for different people. When people think plagiarism, they think theft. In my mind, the real crime is unoriginality, not theft. Unoriginality simply implies a lack of ability in developing novel thoughts, not malicious intent, while theft does.
Is ownership of words honestly a realistic standard?
In a world where books, Google and everything in between exist, sadly, I think not.
