Something Borrowed

After receiving an email concerning plagiarism from Peter, I thought about the article I read last mouth related to this topic. A few people have to leave their employment and even worse they are accused of a certain crime, theft since they copy other’s words. This is not different than stealing. This article, however, does not focus on how serious punishment of plagiarism is under the intellectual property law. It shows a different perspective of plagiarism that people may be too obsessed with it and therefore this limit creativity.

The main part of this article is that Gladwell and his friend’s writing was plagiarised by the play, named Frozen, but both of them have a totally different reaction towards such crime. His friend thinks that she would sue a person who did it, whereas Gladwell who feels upset at the very first place decided not to resort to legal action. Conversely, he feels pride that his writing has become a part of magnum opus. Moreover, he cites the Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig from the book, called Free Culture: the line drawn between private interests and public interests in intellectual property should be in the fine line that protects from copying but not too limits the mutual benefits. Regarding literature, people never accept copying at any case. Frozen uses Gladwell’s description of his friend’s work and “the outline of his friend’s work as main storyline to create the play and that should be the way creativity works as Gladwell claims that “old words in the service of a new idea aren’t the problem” and “What inhibits creativity is new word in the service of an old idea”. Although his career as a journalist makes e him to focus on plagiarism, he thinks that every phrase and word has been used more than once were he to search back to the body of English literature. People have just lost track from which the idea originated. He concludes that “the final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution do not exist and that a writer’s words have a virgin birth and an eternal life”

First of all, I am, as always, impressed by Gladwell’s nature of storytelling skills. This makes me as a reader understand some difficult ideas clearly, which allows me to keep reading his articles.

Secondly, although plagiarism is considered as a crime, people can be trapped by this idea and discourage the creativity or innovation. Considering the fact that there are many songs that use the same order of notes but may be different rhythm or pitch and this certainly would not call copying since there are eighth notes in one octave. Composers seem to be limited by the choices if they are too concerned about bleaching the intellectual property. Sometimes they combine a good sound from many pieces of other composers, which listeners will hardly notice if they are not told.

Last but not least, I do not mean that we as students should ignore the importance of plagiarism while conducting research. It would be no harm in fact is a MUST to give someone the credit if we use other ideas.


References
Gladwell, M. (2009). should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life? What the Dog saw. New York: Penguin