Plagiarism and piracy – An overview
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”
In this time and age, it ‘s not only those that are poor and immoral purchase pirated goods: doctors, professor and lawyers all purchase pirated goods too. It’s also not only the lazy and weak students that plagiarize, it is estimated that approximately 80% of college students have plagiarize at some point in their college career. In this article, I will discuss the issue of plagiarism followed by piracy.
If piracy is wrong then why does no one feel guilty when they do it? Piracy feels right because it’s easy and convenient. Most people would not take a DVD from a store without paying for it because this is consider ” stealing” but yet most people who call that “stealing” still continue to buy pirated goods. All in all, most people don’t think copyright violations are morally wrong because they can’t identify a person who gets harmed. Another viewpoint of this topic is that the more your work is pirated or plagiarized, the more popular it gets. Only famous products are pirated and only quality essays are plagiarized. Therefore, the author and/or the producer of the product should be proud that their works is being plagiarized or pirated since their product is considered superior to their competition
In the words of a students who obtained a huge amount of his music library from illegal file sharing sites and often plagiarized essays from the Internet “There’s no chance of you getting caught, and it doesn’t hurt anyone directly, “ Is his opinion right? Why waste money on original goods if you can obtain a pirated one for a cheaper price and the same quality? In fact, certain people are so poor that they are unable to buy copies of the original product and that the developer of the original product would not gain any revenue at all whether they copied it or not. However, if the tables were turned and the person who brought the pirated good or wrote an essay that was plagiarized, one could reasonably assume that he or she would not approve of people making copies of their work without crediting them or paying them. Some people might not realize that when they’re copying someone else work or buying pirated goods, they’re not just stealing words or moving pictures, and they’re stealing something that the original person has put a lot of thought and effort into.
Quite simply put, piracy and plagiarism is wrong and unethical because it denies the producer the rightful reward for creating a product. However, looking closely, defining plagiarism will raise some disagreements from different parties. For example:
– The Twilight Saga – Human girl falls in love with a vampire. There are werewolves – The Vampire Academy – Human girl falls in love with a vampire. There are also werewolves – The Vampire Diaries- Human girl falls in love with a vampire. There are also werewolves
If plagiarism is defined as taking someone else’s idea or words then all three author of the books mentioned above are guilty of plagiarizing, but you don’t see the three authors suing each other. On the other hand, some teachers believe that even paraphrasing an essay is considered plagiarizing. The following is an extract from an interview with a teacher who preferred to remain anonymous. ” Instead of paraphrasing someone else work, you should learn from other people’s work first and then writing yours. The extent of plagiarism and piracy nowadays worries me, as I’m afraid that students would not be able to produce a piece of original work without plagiarizing or at the very least paraphrasing someone else work. Furthermore, the extent of piracy nowadays will cause many artiste, writers and so on to lose interest in their field.