Granted, we all know that plagiarism, the utterly reprehensible act of using someone else’s thoughts, reaping the rewards of that use, and then not even providing the source of the information, is officially a bad thing. But let’s look at it from the plagiarist’s point of view.
Here are some of the perks of a career as a plagiarist:
Energy saving: ‘Copying and pasting’ uses far fewer resources than thinking your way around anything. Any fool can see that.
- Time saving – Obviously, the time that is not spent doing your own research and your own thinking, can be spent on other more valuable activities. Finding other people to steal from, for example.
- esteem of colleagues – What writer could fail to admire a person who can meet assignment deadlines efficiently and quickly while staying on top of the latest news? What could be more modern?
- professional friends – The long-term plagiarist is guaranteed (thanks to CopyScape), to get to know any number of lawyers and other underlings up close. Maybe he can even hang out with them at their clubs and stuff.
- Evolution – the plagiarist, after all, will be teaching their children that it’s perfectly acceptable to misuse someone else’s property, especially if you can do it without having to go through pesky details like permission. To be sure, the advantages to the body politic of that child’s adulthood are obvious.
There are, of course, many other advantages, but mentioning them would simply be an unnecessary exercise in dealing with plagiarist’s brilliant justifications.
However, we feel that our charity vanishes when we consider the concept of honor and honorable behavior. We hold this truth that honor is the lubricant that enables a civil society. Furthermore, we hold that plagiarism is a dishonorable act.
Profiting at the expense of others is, and has been, an antisocial act and is essentially considered theft. The fact that it is a thought being stolen (as opposed to an object) cannot be offered as an excuse. An object, after all, is neither more nor less than an original thought. The same can be said of recorded thought, whatever the form of the recording. It doesn’t matter if that recorded thought may have been lying around for years unread until the plagiarists showed up. The fact of an original author must be acknowledged. Certainly, if that registered thought is used, a reward must be made.
Having heard the plagiarist’s justifications and weighed against our concepts of civil society, it is our judgment that all convicted plagiarists should hear the original author’s problems.