Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V: The Art of Plagiarism

Modern dictionaries define plagiarism as wrongful appropriation or close imitation of an author’s language, thoughts, ideas or expression by presenting it as their own original work. However, it remains in question for there is no precise distinction between imitation, plagiarism by style, replication and forgery.

In the old times, plagiarism is defined as someone who is guilty of being a literary theft. It is about stealing one’s work; however, there was no boundary as it was defined now. Truly, plagiarism is a crime that should be taken seriously.

Amidst the controversy faced by Sen. Sotto, he said in his speech that plagiarism is never a crime in the Philippines. For me, it is considered immoral for it is a violation of originality and individuality. Sotto was even hounded by a multitude of criticisms by the netizens and call himself as the first senator to be bullied in the cyberspace. I really doubt this time if the bills you passed were actually original in form.

As for my stance against plagiarism, one should always provide the statistics. I do not mean numbers here but rightfully indicating the name author, the publication and the year it was published. One should give sufficient credit for all the copy-paste methodologies we know.

If in case you cannot get away with plagiarism, why don’t you do reverse engineering? It is about modifying the whole sentence into a more appealing one compared to the original. It should possess novelty, better understanding and insights and of course, higher form of acceptability. Still, the ideas were extracted from the original source, which is still plagiarism. It would be better if you construct your own based on your intuition or judgment.

Copying from one source is called plagiarism. Copying from many sources is called research. Now, let’s do research!