Copyrights and Copywrongs
Why plagiarism is great
September 20, 2006
Jay Jameson
I am an exceptionally ethical individual. Probably even more so than yourself. But in all honesty, one of the reasons I refuse to cheat is that I might get caught and then people wouldn’t like me as much.
However, from time to time in grade school, I would give myself an unfair advantage on my arithmetic tests. Math was never really my strong point, so I learned to count well before I learned to add. Unfortunately, we students were forbidden to count on our fingers during addition tests, and I once failed such an exam because I was caught treating my left hand like a makeshift abacus.
I always figured that by doing this, the teachers were trying to somehow prepare us for the real world, but I never understood how. I don’t have that counting problem anymore, though. My teachers nowadays don’t seem to care about stuff like that; I could even bring a graphing calculator to class if I knew how to use one. But these days, the thing that really makes my profs go ape is that unforgivable, abstract notion of plagiarism.
It has always been difficult for me to empathize with those big-shot authors and academic journalists who are supposedly getting violated on a daily basis by us lazy college students. After all, it’s not like anyone’s downloading their music off the internet for free or anything.
Personally, the closest I ever came to being plagiarized is when someone steals my hilarious jokes without proper citation. Every once in a while you encounter that friend who can’t think of anything clever to say on his own, so he has to recycle your amusing comments to new audiences in order to get big laughs. He knows full well that you think he’s a fraud, but he doesn’t care because everybody else likes him. This is infuriating. However, I am not afraid to admit that I only despise this misdirected laughter merely because I am so desperate for everyone’s attention. Incidentally, this is also the reason I can’t stand people with ADD. I suppose it’s very similar with those big-shot authors as well. They want all the credit they can get, even if it’s from some halfwit on Ebscohost at four in the morning trying to sound intelligent. Not unlike myself, they do this because they want to be liked. And don’t we all?
I, therefore, submit that every act of copyright is motivated wholly out of selfishness. After all, Jesus never copyrighted any of his parables. Although I do not condone plagiarism, I do like to dwell on the concept. It reminds me that the great writers and researchers of the last several hundred years were just as needy and insecure as myself. And naturally, they want plenty of praise and recognition for their so-called contributions to humanity.
Thus, if someone were to plagiarize this article somewhere down the line without expressed written consent from me or my publisher, I think I might pull a Jesus and just let it slide.
Now you go...
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