Plagiarism has always been a problem. \u00a0Sometimes people steal other peoples’ words and ideas. \u00a0More often they just take shortcuts, ignoring\u00a0established\u00a0procedures for acknowledgements and just hoping that if they do end up getting\u00a0caught, they can just plead ignorance and apologize.<\/p>\n
But the scope and dimensions of the problems are inherently more troubling in a digital age. In fact, they are so different that it is even possible that the definition of plagiarism might soon change. \u00a0That is the underlying question lurking\u00a0behind a fascinating piece which appeared this past summer in Salon <\/em>called, “Cut, Paste, Plagiarize.”<\/a>\u00a0 Author Michael Barthel, a graduate student at the University of Washington, used a recent plagiarism scandal concerning CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, as a springboard to compare old ethics versus new ethics. \u00a0“Everything on the Internet gets stolen,” he writes\u00a0meaning not that it’s really theft, but rather that it’s part of what many are now calling a “remix culture.” \u00a0Barthel is not necessarily celebrating this shift, but he is describing something that seems almost irreversible. \u00a0“The Web, and the generation who grew up with it,” he observes, “<\/span>think about plagiarism very differently\u00a0than do the keepers of journalistic ethics.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n