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Plagiarism?


jonathan7

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Just finished watching This Week on BBC1 (for the many non Brits - its basically a weekly programme which sums up the weeks political developments).

 

There was a debate on plagiarism; with a music artist (so famous I don't have a clue who it was was), saying that we all plagiarise, and that no one is 'original'; that people just change and adapt previous ideas.

 

What are people's thoughts?

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There was a debate on plagiarism; with a music artist (so famous I don't have a clue who it was was), saying that we all plagiarise, and that no one is 'original'; that people just change and adapt previous ideas.

 

Perhaps Coldplay? It's been in the news recently I think.

 

I pretty much agree.

 

_EW_

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Well, he's technically correct, the songs sung are just using different words to decribe the same things. We're not explicit copying from another person, as plagiarism is usually defined, but we're copying from the same concept. We're original as far as the concept goes that the exact idea and execution of whatever it we just did is different than how it's been done before.

 

I don't really take that side of the argument for anything other than argument's sake, which I'm not going to do here. I don't think ideas, feelings, and concepts can be plagiarized, they're all sort of a public domain thing. The idea of traveling in space is not something that is plagiarizeable. People like to travel to new places, space can be traveled and there are new places out there. It's human nature to explore.

 

I prefer to think of plagiarism in the way that musician describes it as inspiration. We are taking the concept and making our own idea with it. It's not wholly original, and sometimes not even very unique, but the thing we created is neither a copy nor a a truly derivative work of the "original" concept, and definitely not either of another person's concept-inspired work.

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That is complete utter bullcrap. He says no one is original? So did the first person who wrote/sung the first song, was he plagiarizing someone else?

 

I'm not necessarily saying he is correct, however I think you may have missed the profoundness of what he is indicating.

 

Everything you have ever learned; where did you learn it from?

 

As I think EW and WR's posts indicates this is perhaps a subjective discussion.

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Ideas and concepts may not be new, but the specific way that a musician or author puts the music/lyrics/words together is a unique product. Star Wars borrowed from many previous concepts, but are you going to tell me it was just the same thing as everything else? Its themes may not be unique at all, but the way Lucas approached it was, and the product certainly was something novel.

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There was a debate on plagiarism; with a music artist (so famous I don't have a clue who it was was), saying that we all plagiarise, and that no one is 'original'; that people just change and adapt previous ideas.

 

What are people's thoughts?

I'm not sure what the artist was trying to say with that statement. I imagine it was something like: "All humans have human interests." But then, that (usually) goes without saying; he's not making any kind of distinction here. It's like defining "bachelor" as an unmarried man (which is not necessarily the only meaning it can have): the word hasn't actually been used yet, but we're pointing at something, pointing something out that's interesting to us. "Look at this!"-- He's drawing our attention to a certain aspect of our lives.

 

"There's nothing new under the sun." Oh? Is that supposed to be an empirical statement? It certainly looks as if it would make sense to say: "But there are new things!" Does it make sense to say that? No. That sort of statement ("Nothing new...") is of a different kind, and different responses are required. And so with this: there is more than one concept at work here, even though they are expressed with the same words-- "plagiarism", "original" etc. In the quote, the artist is saying: "Look! Here's what people are like!" He's not talking about stealing other people's work.

 

When he (the artist) does happen to use the word "plagiarize" to, e.g. differentiate between persons who appropriate work not their own and those who don't, then he will be doing something very different than he was doing in your quote. I am not inclined to equate the two kinds of statements, and we must be careful not to confuse one kind for the other. Doing so might make us think we plagiarize everything. ;)

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Yeah sure.. We 'plagiarize', but in a very, very, extremely limited sense...

 

But I'm not going to have some guy come up and tell me all of my ideas are unoriginal... The human imagination is quite powerful... We may base everything of of what we know, but it's not enough to be plagiarism. Everyone else explained it quite nicely, so that is why I've made such a simple, not well-explained answer...

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We need to conserve resources. Go green and plagiarize.[/Quote]

 

The hell? How does that work?

 

Well, we don't plagiarize, plagiarism is taking a direct copy (Or a copy of something only changing several words here and there) and then claiming it as your own.

 

I know that that happens, but there are also unique ideas. I cannot accept that everything we do is plagiarism. Not because I am trying to bury my head in the sand, but because I know new ideas happen.

 

Do they springboard off others' ideas? Of course they do! But they're not plagiarizing.

 

Let's say 20-50 years in the future, some scientist (Or Think Tank) figures out how to use Fusion without problems, then the next power source of the future has to be figured out. What that scientist (Or Think Tank) does is going to be totally new... unless, of course, they use Anti-Matter.

 

But, that's a new idea, not plagiarizing.

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There is a distinct difference between plagiarizing and the interpretation of a concept or idea. Think about every love song you've ever heard...they all talk about similar things, but with the artists own interpretation and words used to describe them. An even better example is the Bible. Each branch of Christianity has a different interpretation of what it says or means, and even non-Christian religions interpret it as well.

 

Plagiarism is taking someone's original idea and attempting to pass it off as your own such as copying a term paper word for word from the internet, or taking an artists original lyrics and putting your name on them without giving proper credit, or attempting to pass off someone else's game mod as your own which I'm sure most of us are familiar with.

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Just finished watching This Week on BBC1 (for the many non Brits - its basically a weekly programme which sums up the weeks political developments).

 

There was a debate on plagiarism; with a music artist (so famous I don't have a clue who it was was), saying that we all plagiarise, and that no one is 'original'; that people just change and adapt previous ideas.

 

What are people's thoughts?

Post-modernization has been fully realized. Lol... Yes. What he is saying is actually true. Art history professors at my college have expressed such a concern. We live in an era called "the Recycleables". I made that last one up. ;) We take allready established products and ideas, and then we recyle them into another piece of art. The last art movement that really ment something was established in the 1930s - 1960s.

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