24 December 2011

Is plagiarism becoming acceptible?

October of 2011 was the worst month since 2005 for plagiarism, according to Regret the Error's Craig Silverman.

Silverman wrote a post for Poynter.org where he reported nine cases of plagiarism in October. The second worst month was in March of 2008, according to Silverman.

What does this mean for modern journalism? Obviously people are still being reprimanded in some way, but some of these cases could even be considered copyright infringement. These reported cases are likely a small fraction of actual word theft.

Does this mean limited plagiarism is becoming acceptable, as long as the theft doesn't take away from the value of the original piece? Or does it mean that we are just not keen-eyed enough to catch all cases? Does any of this matter?

Let us know in the comments.

No comments:

Post a Comment