It's easy to become attached to your words, claiming ownership to their arrangement on the page and to the phrases you create. But how much do you really own what you write? How much have you, technically, plagiarized?
Back at the end of 2004, writer Malcolm Gladwell tackled the issue of plagiarism as it pertained to him, having felt that a stageplay called Frozen liberally lifted text from an article he wrote. He initially began his thoughts on plagiarism as most do:
Words belong to the person who wrote them. There are few simpler ethical notions than this one, particularly as society directs more and more energy and resources toward the creation of intellectual property. In the past thirty years, copyright laws have been strengthened. Courts have become more willing to grant intellectual-property protections. Fighting piracy has become an obsession with Hollywood and the recording industry, and, in the worlds of academia and publishing, plagiarism has gone from being bad literary manners to something much closer to a crime. When, two years ago, Doris Kearns Goodwin was found to have lifted passages from several other historians, she was asked to resign from the board of the Pulitzer Prize committee. And why not? If she had robbed a bank, she would have been fired the next day.
Gladwell wrote the author of the play to let her know he felt that she'd stolen his text for use in her work and immediately regretted it: [...]
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