Dictionaries define plagiarism as the act of using another person’s idea or a part of their work and passing it off as your own.
I am not a big fan of plagiarism but I do often wonder if there is anything such as an original idea. I shall not venture to determine plagiriasm concerning established facts or figures. Those are more, if not entirely, blatant. I’m referring to ‘ideas’ because to me that’s a bit foggy.
Can anyone apart from first gen humans, hermits and people who grew up on isolated islands – with zero exposure to other thinking and living objects – claim to have produced a one hundred per cent original notion?
I know I am being pedantic but bear with me. Everything we do or say or think is basically a partial sum of our experiences. Everything we write is a subconscious reflection of everything we’ve read or seen and people we know or have met.
So how can we possibly claim those ideas as our own? They belong to someone else, who, in all likelihood, have also plagiarised in a similar manner from someone before them.
If someone rehashed and republished this post would I flip a bitch and want to sue their pants off? Most likely but that’s only because I imagine suing is educational and fun. But am I logically entitled to claim this post as my original idea? I’m not sure. It’s quite likely that I may have plagiarised the idea of plagiarism.
I reproduced a part of it in my own words. The other bits probably came from some of my other experiences. Just because no one can detect and identify all those sources – making it impossible to accuse me of plagiarism – can I claim this to be a one hundred per cent original work of mine?
A few days ago, I read a post by Scott Reynolds Nelson about how he used his grandma’s experience to draw a parallel between the current economic depression and the ones during the 1930s and the 1870s – and how those parallels were conveniently plagiarised and run as first page report by a Dutch financial newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad. The newspaper editor clarified, Nelson’s theory was not a “unique achievement”. I could get behind that.
But the question still stands – is there a thing as a unique achievement? A hundred per cent original idea?
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