Plagiarism

Plagiarism is as old as time, its forms, methods and techniques are many, but it remains plagiarism. Plagiarism, theft, piracy, literary/intellectual/artistic plagiarism, plagiarism of literary/intellectual property, stealing the works of others, fabrication of literary/artistic production are all terms that indicate one meaning. Many definitions of the term plagiarism have emerged, as the Cambridge Dictionary defined it as “copying the work or ideas of another person”, and Oxford University defined it as “presenting the work or ideas of another person as your own, with or without their consent, by incorporating them into your own work without full acknowledgement of the original owner”. Many researchers and authors suffer these days from systematic plagiarism by others, which leads to devastating results for everyone. In this article, we will briefly discuss some of the common reasons that drive someone to steal the ideas and efforts of others and attribute them to himself. These reasons are as follows:

The first reason for plagiarism is that it is part of human nature for some people. There are many people who have the plagiarism gene in their genome. But can we consider this a negative behavior? We can note that “some people plagiarize because they get their adrenaline pumping, others don’t have time to prepare well, and some cheat as a way of life. In the end, this is how people are” (Plagiarism and Human Nature). This, of course, depends on each case, as Miroslava Meyrink points out, “We cheat on each other unconsciously because this is our human nature. The moment we are born, we learn to copy from others and imitate certain things in our environment. Even when I talk to you about it, I am not expressing my own thoughts.” The question here is: Is the above true for all cases.

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The second common reason for plagiarism is that some people in the academic field, such as professors and students, want to get better academic benefits and levels or want to succeed in their courses and jobs in the fastest and easiest way, so they copy and steal the work and efforts of others without any consideration for the devastating effects this has on everyone. Here, we may have to differentiate between experts and specialists in the academic field – such as professors, teachers, and others – and non-specialists, such as most student researchers in universities, and this is important as a report issued by the University of North Carolina indicated that “usually when student researchers plagiarize, they do not do so intentionally, but rather fall into it by accident, and the reason is that they do not have a complete understanding of what plagiarism is.” The question here is: Does the above apply to academic experts? Or can this type of expert, for example, justify their actions based on the idea put forward by Tom Peters in 1989, in which he indicated that “creative theft is the act of adopting and adapting the good ideas of others and making them your own ideas” 🤔. The second question here is: Is there creative theft and uncreative theft? What do you think?

Another reason for plagiarism is the weakness or absence of laws and regulations that regulate such matters. The existence of laws and regulations is one of the most important factors in determining whether or not plagiarism exists in a given case, whether this plagiarism is intentional or unintentional, and what the next step is in the event of plagiarism or not. For example, a report issued by the University of the Pacific indicated that there are many cases in which “plagiarism has been considered a form of theft: taking someone else’s property and using it as one’s own.”

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This article by Farhan Blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International