Reading this article, I realized how little I actually know about what plagiarism is and how it is defined. To me, it has always compromised of an immoral act with the intention of appropriating someone else’s idea and using it under his own name in order to profit from it. It has never occurred to me that even inspiration, as has been mentioned in the article, is also a form of plagiarism. How can be such an innocent and beautiful thing such as inspiration guilty of the ugly act of plagiarism?
And so I looked up the definition of inspiration. According to the Oxford Dictionary, inspiration is in its essence a “process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative”. This implies stimulation has to inherently come from somewhere. Does it then really mean we are all guilty of appropriation no matter what? To humans, inspiration is a natural occurrence. Without inspiration, humans wouldn’t invent instruments, that consequently distinguished us from other animals. I remember I have once read a scientific article about how human brain cannot imagine something completely new, his imagination is bound to be a composition of things he as already seen and that have been stored in the part of his memory he may be unconscious of. And so the man imagines and creates based on the things that already exist.
In this sense, it seems like we have been born as plagiarists. Then what is the point of a law that condemns the entire body of people it should be aiding and protecting?