It’s apparent that everyone contends/accepts certain amount of plagiarism. Its ok to look back and say “yeah, i did cheat in the university exams”, that was fun, but to hack a computer and cheat in a online exam is considered serious, unethical and would direct no respect to the hard work put in by the hacker. If being “happy” and at peace is the ultimate goal of existence, then the use of anything to achieve “that can” should be “legal”, but if not (“happiness” is under scrutiny here), we should start giving originator the due credit.
Trying to talk more than experience(we cant experience everything can we?) , stealing can supercede emotions (not talking about freewill again), the act can merely represent the desire/need to be something at certain time, but the truth prevails in different ways in different situations (now what the hell is truth? not to speculate, lets call it recording of temperature at 2 AM IST in pune, thats 21C on most rainy days). Using lines(calling it ours) from the ever bluesy “buddy guy” for a girl in college may not lessen the intensity of act , but trying to publish a research algorithm by reproducing it not only leads to hue and cry among fellows , but also spoils the chance of a better thought(not to say that a better song cudn’t have been written , but just that the action still almost remains the same).
Isnt appropriation of jobs by inappropriate people plagiarism? What about the “technical” guys being lead by the managers. What about the sovereigns and the “suavities” who occupy inspite of lack of need, what about the second hand essays that people use to get into stanford? Its naive to generalize, but if this world were left to copying and pasting, may be – Oh’ look it seems earth really is round days are not far away!
But such is human nature we can justify everything and anything, the only thing most of us need to justify is ourselves, if thats not enough we seek the replicas in others, and the distribution curve being so flat inspite of the difference, its easy to to draw the graph and find it to be more correct after every glance at it. This art has taken advantage of ignorance (we cant lead two lives at the same time) , but now the euvres are well accesible, result? Now plagiarism has to be taken to another level.
May be conscience fault is present on both sides which are facing plagiarism, but lets just remove “conscience” out of context (because its a bit too relative ). What if somebody exposed few things to the commons, is the desire of power(x) in one more important than the knowledge acquired by hundred? Does galileo’s times-squared law becomes less important if it was his wife marina who formulated it in the first place? What about newton and pythagoras who’s major theories are less thought to theirs and more to be plagiarized. Are we defending stealth here? If mankind has to progress rapidly then i guess plagiarism has to cultivated properly. Radical as it may sound, but we just need a “tweak” in what is already existing, slowly but surely majority of the world would then know basic sciences, basic logic from the “doopy” gurus, no longer would the spectrum of people knowing less be so large, giving more and more chance to so called “originality” , atleast in the word sense.
Lot of us are so preoccupied in ourselves that we dont even bother to look beyond before calling something an imitation. A little history, After galileo had heard the news of discovery of something that functions equal to “telescope”, he had built something “telescopic” within 24 hours of the news, and it was way better than what was produced by the dutch. He did that just(not just!! really) to get back into the helm of university from which he was outcast. Any chance, if there would have been communication channels like those of today, his genious would have been rendered to a mere “imitation”. There was a guy from college, given a chance, would even call the idea of god to produce human beings an imitation, in a way he was probably right, but what he lacked was the power to see that parallel thought is not a rare but a very natural and common occurrence.
May be the future generations will laugh at us for fighting plagiarism, or our ineptness at handling such a thing. Crime is not good for the society but it exists, so it doesnt mean that we have to accept it, what we have to accept though is the criminals, isnt it? But what about it, do we really need to make a fuss about it? Why do we have to care about the seeds of a tree which has already bears good fruit, are we above truth? can solution become less important than the somebody who raised the question? If people really cared about plagiarism, it should challenge there creative levels even more (now please dont get into what is being creative, enough for now)
