Tens of thousands of students are now settling back into their college and university classes, ready and no doubt eager for the eager for the challenges of the new semester. One of those challenges will be to avoid plagiarism, a campus crime almost as heinous as sexual harassment or a taste for 1940s Big Band music. Some students will be required to sign long, impressive documents, written by lawyers who stole the wording from other lawyers, certifying that they understand the penalties for plagiarism. They may have no idea what it is, but they will sign anyway. Others will be severely lectured on the subject their professors. I know, because I've delivered and received many such lectures myself.

Plagiarism is the theft of intellectual property - or more plainly to pass off someone else's work as your own. Intellectual property is just stuff that people have made up or created. This essay is intellectual property, and could conceivably be plagiarized by some abysmally stupid student somewhere, who would get a well-deserved F.

Plagiarism is a very ancient art. Shakespeare stole most of his historical plots directly from the unreliable histories of Holinshed. Laurence Sterne and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were both accused of plagiarism.

In modern times, plagiarism is not limited to lazy and dishonest students. Lazy and dishonest adults are equally guilty.. Almost every week we read another high-profile case from the world of academia or publishing. The distinguished historian Stephen E. Ambrose, and another historian Professor Doris Kearns have both been in the news recently, accused of lifting chunks of their works from previously published authors. Lord Archer, the disgraced British novelist and politician, is another distinguished example. Politicians borrow chunks of speeches from more intelligent men, artists copy photographers and each other, and musicians notoriously "borrow" certain melodic ideas when inspiration runs out. These rip-offs are routinely passed off as "tributes." Movies are so obsessively self-referential that you get the feeling that nothing completely new has been attempted since "The Great Train Robbery" in 1903. Real creativity is very rare.

In a sense, then, all culture is plagiarism. We can't reinvent the world every day, but we can and do copy the good stuff from the past, and perhaps transform it in the process. So I don't feel strongly about intellectual property as such. When great genius or large amounts of money are involved, I suppose it becomes important. But most creative work isn't in that league and, on the whole, we should be mildly flattered when someone finds our work worth stealing. After all, the plagiarist gains nothing, and the act itself is rather pathetic, an admission of an empty mind. I can forgive a modest amount of plagiarism, especially if it's well done

But I do have strong feelings about cheating partly because I never could get away with it when I was a student. The worldwide web has made plagiarism infinitely easier, and less detectable, and cheating by students has become an epidemic. If you look up plagiarism on the web you will find hundreds of articles and books condemning it, and even anti-plagiarism software. The cheaters cheat themselves out of an education, they cheat the honest students, and they make fools out of their teachers. I don't like any of that.

The moral question is: should we discourage cheating? News media at the moment are full of stories about cheating on an epic scale. The notable fact about the guilty parties is that they are all very, very rich. My mother used to tell me that cheats never prosper: but they do. Cheating may be as essential to success in the modern world as computer literacy. By discouraging plagiarism and similar tricks, we may be condemning our students to a life of poverty and hard work

If anyone has the answer to this educational conundrum, please let me know. But don't send me any of those anti-plagiarism articles off the web - I've read them already. Where do you think this essay came from?
Warning: include(/export/home/www/wshu/includes/footer.inc) [function.include]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /export/home/www/wshu/bouchier/2002/db020128.php on line 28

Warning: include() [function.include]: Failed opening '/export/home/www/wshu/includes/footer.inc' for inclusion (include_path='.:/opt/coolstack/php5/lib/php') in /export/home/www/wshu/bouchier/2002/db020128.php on line 28