My Original Thought for the Day

A comment I received on my recent Fight Club article got me thinking…does a social revolution/innovation lose some of its value and worthiness if the idea was stolen from someone who never received credit?

Plagiarism is, of course, an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else’s work and lying about it afterward. In the U.S., the expression of original ideas is considered intellectual property – and is protected by copyright law.

Today, there are millions of cases of plagiarism – some blatant copy-and-paste jobs by lazy college students, and some intellectual copyright disputes over similarity of phrasing, key plot points, or main ideas.



Here are a few famous examples:

· Alexander Graham Bell supposedly stole the idea for the telephone from Elisha Gray. Ironically, a man who wrote Bell’s biography in 1998 (James McKay) was forced to withdraw his book from circulation because he plagiarized the last biography written about Bell.

· Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club contains very similar plot details (such as a radical soap collector who tries to push his friend into absolute freedom without actually existing; an elusive woman; identically wounded, burned hands and an intentional car accident) to Leonard Cohen’s 1966 book Beautiful Losers.

· Conservative blogger Ben Domenech, soon after he was hired to write a blog for the Washington Post in 2006, was found to have plagiarized a number of columns and articles he'd written for his college newspaper, lifting passages from a variety of sources ranging from well-known pundits to amateur film critics.

· Alex Haley, author of Roots, was forced to pay a $650,000 settlement after it was discovered that he copied about 80 passages from Harold Courlander’s The African.

· Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, has twice been accused of plagiarism from the books The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Legacy.

· In 1991 Boston University discovered that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized large portions of his doctoral thesis…as well as parts of his “I Have a Dream” speech.

· In 2007, Timbaland was accused of stealing motifs and samples from Nelly Furtado’s song “Do It”.

· Senator Joe Biden was forced to withdraw from the 1988 Democratic presidential nominations when it was discovered that he failed a college course on legal methodology due to plagiarism. The Michael Dukakis campaign also released a video showing Biden quoting a speech from British labor leader Neil Kinnock without attributing its source.

· Helen Keller was accused in 1892 of plagiarizing Margaret T. Canby’s story The Frost Fairies in her short story The Frost King.

· Mark Zuckerberg, the “brains behind Facebook” was accused by his college friends of stealing the idea, formatting, and coding for the site from their innovative social network idea.



Which leads us to ask the imperative question: what’s more important – the ideas behind the social revolution…or assigning who gets credit for them?



I believe that originality is simply undetected plagiarism. You copy from one source and it’s called plagiarism, but copy from two and it’s termed research. No one has a unique thought anymore.



People have parallel thought patterns, the tendency towards the same phrasing. Yes, there are definitely cases where someone directly lifts another’s exact wording. But as far as intellectual copyright as far as ideas go….I think most cases are worthless and wrong. Somewhere, chances are, someone is probably thinking about the exact same thing as you. Does that give you grounds to call “plagiarism!!”?



I think not.



NOTE: this entire article was plagiarized. The idea to write a plagiarized article about plagiarism was itself plagiarized from another person…but I won’t name my source, otherwise it wouldn’t count as plagiarism.



Does the fact that it was copied make the ideas and points any less valid? Does it REALLY matter who gets credit –who said it “first”? Anyone who supports prosecution of plagiarism is a pure narcissist.