Plagiarism: Two Different Perspectives By Sharon White At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

They have established a “Fair Use Doctrine”, which in short states that it is illegal to use someone’s work without referencing to it. However there are some exceptions: ”The copyright law contemplates that fair use of a copyrighted work without permission shall be for purposes such as (1) criticism and comment, (2) parody and satire, (3) scholarship and research, (4) news reporting and (5) teaching, and that such fair use will not result in the infringement of a copyrighted work”. Plagiarism in most cases is a question of ethics. Every person who seeks an idea faces the ethical dilemma. To cheat or not to cheat is the question that appears in mind of everyone who is considering plagiarizing. At this point I’d like bring up the argument regarding paraphrasing. We are familiar with the Shakespeare’s Hamlet phrase “To be or not to be”. I just used the phrase above “To cheat or not to cheat”, would you consider this a plagiarism? At this point it appears that paraphrasing is a lot more complex subject to discuss. First, there is a good and a bad paraphrasing. The edge between these two is quite thin in my opinion.

Paraphrasing has a lot to do with the next type of plagiarism using someone’s idea. It is obvious that simply taking someone’s idea and claiming that it is yours is not only unethical, but it is wrong and violates the law. Again, it brings us back to the copyright violation. But what about taking someone’s idea and developing it into a new piece of work? This development of idea most of the time results in the wonderful masterpieces. Just think about how many writers have taken and developed Bible ideas into the wonderful books and stories. Can this be considered a plagiarism? For me the answer is no.

One might argue that Bible is a book of life and has a set of rules, which are general ideas and reference to this book cannot be considered cheating in any case. Plus there is no exact writer of Bible, whose rights you are violating.

What about using someone’s idea like in the following case: “A recent article in the New York Times seriously entertained the possibility that the form of a proposed skyscraper by Zaha Hadid might be influenced by the design of a screen in Kennedy Airport”. I believe this is not the plagiarism case either. After all, everything comes out of something. Every idea needs a push to be born. Not every idea falls from the tree in form of an apple like in Newton’s case. And we are all just human, and, unfortunately, very few of us are genius.

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