WHY IS THERE SO MUCH PLAGIARISM TODAY?

Mark Twain once said that there is no such thing as an original idea. We’ve come up with a lot of original ideas since then, but you would never know it with all the plagiarism going on today.

We now live in a world where’s there’s so much intellectual theft and plagiarism, it has become epidemic. We are a nation of copycats.

From academic writing to the internet, from technology to contemporary music, from computer programming to marketing, plagiarism is everywhere.

Social media encourages it – it’s called “sharing.” Hip hoppers reuse portions of other musician’s work; it’s called “sampling.” Joe Biden was a plagiarist and look what happened to him – he became president.  And what about the Chinese? They are the ultimate plagiarizers. They built the world’s second largest economy on other country’s ideas.

So, what’s the big deal? Plagiarism is so commonplace, it has become acceptable. It shouldn’t be acceptable. It’s intellectual theft and it’s illegal.

But where do you draw the line? And who draws it?

Plagiarism is a plague on the internet, and needs to be stopped, says plagiarism expert, Jonathon Bailey, who has an entire website dedicated to the subject called,  PlagiarismToday.com. And now there are websites devoted to plagiarism checking, like Codio and Grammarly.

You can blame the explosion of plagiarism on the internet and specifically on Google because they’ve made it so easy to steal other people’s ideas. Just search, scroll, copy, and paste. This has made people lazy and it encourages them to take short-cuts. Or maybe Mark Twain was right, there is nothing original anymore, so why not just copy what you want, claim it as yours and share it.

By the way, if you’re wondering if any of this article was plagiarized, nope, not one word – except what was credited. Check it out for yourself on Grammarly’s plagiarism detector: www.grammarly.com/plagiarism-checker

By Dan Chambers

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