Most writers fear plagiarism because they don’t understand it. It is defined as “the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.” But it is far more complicated than that when it comes to tracing the lineage of ideas.

Are there any original ideas that don’t need to be referenced? Over 3,000 years ago, King Solomon said:

What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

In the song “Brownsville Girl,” co-authored by Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan, and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard, we see they had a mutual yearning. They said:

If there’s an original thought out there, I could use it right now.

Dylan and Shepard understood they were recycling millennia of human consciousness. They felt little need to cite their sources.

They knew, as all of us should know, that even if they credited the source their idea, there was little chance that person named the source where they got the idea. The originator of any idea is likely lost in the mists of time. Dylan and Shepard understood it was how they reshaped the ideas and words of others that made the difference, not a meaningless chain of sources.

Students and Plagiarism

My son is an adjunct professor of philosophy. In each class syllabus he produces, he is required to include this notice: “There will be significant consequences for students who violate [the college] academic honesty policy. Plagiarists will receive an F for the assignment.” Ouch!

Sadly, academics are in league with what I call the plagiarism industry, those who sell anti-plagiarism software tools, and they have expanded the definition of plagiarism. They want you to document ideas as well as words, and they have added “self-plagiarism” to their list of sins. Self-plagiarism is recycling your own work.

Is this absurd? Yes, it is, and to the point of being manipulative. After all, luminaries such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Joseph Biden got a pass on their plagiarism. Biden has a history of being a serial plagiarist, and it was a significant factor causing him to withdraw from his 1988 presidential campaign.

So, why is there a double standard in the academic world? In my opinion, college teachers may be covering their butts.

Based on my own college teaching experience, I believe that when plagiarism occurs, it means the professor has failed the student. Rather than humiliating a student plagiarist, students should be getting additional training that includes these three things:

1. Learning the difference between copyright infringement and plagiarism

Copyright infringement is using copyrighted material, credited or not, without written permission from the copyright owner or a portion that does not meet the “Fair Use” test. No, I am not an attorney, but most creative people are familiar with these basic laws or have access to an intellectual property attorney.

Plagiarism is not a crime in the U.S. You cannot copyright an idea; therefore, plagiarism is a social taboo at its best and a breach of an institutional policy at its worst.

Legal cases, like the nine “plagiarism” court cases against James Cameron for his “Avatar” movie script, are actually based on copyright law. Yet, copyright only covers:

The exclusive legal right, given to an originator or an assignee to print, publish, perform, film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material, and to authorize others to do the same.

Copyright infringement, or plagiarism, does not include dipping into the river of human consciousness and using the ideas found there.

All nine plaintiffs lost their “plagiarism” cases or withdrew them. As attorney Mitch Tuchman noted:

The plaintiffs came into court enumerating similarities between their novels, scripts, and treatments, on the one hand, and “Avatar” characters, scenes, and settings, on the other. They came assuming Cameron’s familiarity with their works. They came concluding that he had found their creations so compelling that infringement was irresistible. And yet to man or woman, they lost.

Why did they lose? Because Cameron did not violate the law. His alleged plagiarism merely hurt the feelings of writers with similar ideas.

2. How to properly document sources

Any student can avoid tears by using quotation marks and properly crediting sources. Yet, a student can attract a civil copyright lawsuit if they do that improperly. Still, they won’t have a professor pointing the bony finger of plagiarism at them.

Sadly, far too many professors would rather fail students than educate them about how to document sources, even when the rules are simple. Every instructor assumes that students learn the process at a lower level, but many students are ignorant of the procedure. Maybe that’s why King was able to graduate from Morehouse College and Biden from the University of Delaware, and both of them ended up as profligate plagiarists in graduate school.

If a professor detects plagiarism, it is their duty to get remedial education for the student, not throw them out of class or out of school. Serial plagiarists likely have a character flaw, and they require other actions.

3. How to manage time

In most cases, plagiarists took the chance because they did not properly manage their time. They cut and pasted something together at the last minute to meet a deadline.

Sadly, most academics would rather play the nasty game of “gotcha” and fail a student rather than help them to learn to budget time so it doesn’t happen again.

That’s why I think academics are the real villains when it comes to plagiarism. Many of them teach students what to think rather than how to think. And without independent thought, they create a whole new class of plagiarists.

People who know how to think do not need to plagiarize the work of others.

Creatives and Plagiarism

Creative people are not subject to the pettiness of the academic world. No, we do not want to cut and paste, and we want to give credit where credit is due, but we know the power of independent thinking.

And we have no qualms about so-called “self-plagiarism.” We are constantly spinning our ideas and words into different mediums. A blog post becomes a video, and a series of blog posts become a book. That is the nature of our work.

Creatives understand that we are standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. Any creative who believes they have an “original” idea is deluded. And it is absurd to try to footnote every influence.

Transformational thinking is the key

As I have noted, in far too many cases, our teachers have taught us what to think, not how to think, which is a handicap.

Is it too late for you to learn about to think creatively to transform ideas? No, not at all. It takes practice, but you can start today.

The fruits of human consciousness

Poet T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) seemed to agree about how creative people use the fruits of human consciousness. In his book, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, written 100 years ago, he said:

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.

This idea was not new to Eliot. The notion goes back into antiquity. Eliot merely reshaped his expression of it from the uncredited ideas of others, as creative people do.

That is the heart of the matter. We are all reshaping existing ideas and the words used to communicate them. If we cite every influence, there would be no page space for our work.

As creatives, our business is recycling the ideas of others and turning their expression of them into something unique for our time. There is no dishonor in that.

Sources cited:
Unless otherwise noted, Bible quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).

Attorney Mitch Tuchman