Plagiarism

The introduction of social media and the vastly expanding world of the Internet is making it easier and easier to find work to plagiarise - on this note it also makes it easier to find out exactly who is plagiarising and to source the image and artist who is having their work stolen.

The word plagiarise originated from the Latin word 'plagiarus' (kidnapper) and the Greek word 'plagium' (kidnapping). It is a very apt way to describe the theft of someone else's work, as your own work is something you have often spent a long time nurturing, thinking over and finding references, influences, to eventually produce your own piece of work that you should be proud to be the 'parent' of.

Unfortunately, those who are more creatively challenged fail to realise the amount of effort, time, blood, sweat, and tears you have put in to this and decide that they are going to make this work their own - rather than paying homage to your work (recreating it and placing their own spin on it, with no intention to claim the original thoughts and concepts as their own) they will simply rip it off and waving it about in the air proclaiming "look at what I did all by myself all my own work look!". More often than not the plagiariser will earn some form of money or exposure through doing this.

The following posts will take a look at case studies/examples of the act of plagiarism, all researched from different sources of which I will include in the post. Let's not plagiarise plagiarism.