Plagiarism, the very word strikes fear into the hearts of writers everywhere, forcing them to clutch their precious stories to their chests and never show them to a single, living soul. In ye olde days, there was no Google, no MSN, no Yahoo! There were simply two, little gems called “ethics” and “copyright.”
If you were lucky enough to drill down to the bottom of the ethics mine, you consciously knew that you’d be influenced by other writers–but you would expect Thor’s hammer to fall down on your head should you rip one of them off and sell a story using their words. Copyright, on the other hand, is that piece of fool’s gold that everyone buys but no one knows what to do with, because they forget that once you have it–you have to protect it or you lose it.
Enter the internet era with its torrent of words and images. Ever copy an image that you’ve searched for? Used it in a blog post? Did you check to see whether or not you legally could? What about an article? Have you ever used one or two sentences in an assignment because you were rushed and didn’t bother rewriting them?
Personally, I don’t believe that writers are malicious by nature, but I do think that we’ve forgotten to hunt for the copyright, to remember what rights it gives us, because there is so much material out there on the web. Well? I’m certainly not the first to worry about such a thing, nor will I be the last. Fortunately, people a heck of a lot smarter than me found a way to catch plagiarists using search engine technology.
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