Plagiarism

By Phillip (Age 14.5, Island School)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Many people plagiarize for various reasons, whether it's because they feel they don't have the ability to do something original, or simply because they're not bothered. It can range from very small things like copying a math problem off a friend, or to copying someone's business idea like Mark Zuckerberg, when he allegedly copied the initial idea of Facebook from ConnectU. However, in the end, Mark Zuckerberg was more successful, since he was better at executing the idea.

If I was at university and I came up with an idea for a brilliant Internet business and my friend copied my idea and started making a website, I think I'd ask him for credit since he stole the idea from me. However, I wouldn't be very mad because if you put it this way, everyone is plagiarizing. For instance, Steve Jobs mentored the founder of Google, a successful search engine business, and in the end, Google ended up copying Apple's iPhone business and launched the Android system. Although Steve Jobs expressed disappointment and stated, "We did not enter the search engine business, so why did Google enter the smartphone business?", in some ways, Apple gained a competitor. And since iPhones are usually a little ahead of the Androids, Apple made even more money by analyzing the Android's faults and making it even better.

Also, plagiarizing can only be restricted up to a certain extent, and sometimes you can't even tell if they plagiarized or not. If people did not plagiarize and always came up with original ideas, the world wouldn't be as developed as it is now because people always add onto ideas and make it better. If it was totally against the law to take someone's idea and use it, then everything would stay at the most primitive stage of its development and not be able to advance any further.

Maybe it could be that I can re-plagiarize the plagiarized idea and make it even better, and get another friend who is really good at computers to develop a website better than the one that the other friend made, and become a competitor. It might even be better because that means I'll be having two brains behind the operation instead of one, but in a subtler way, since the friend who copied my idea would only really have copied the basis of it. The friend would still have to think on his own in order to keep the business running.

And instead of only looking at the negative side, I might even be able to look at the positive side and become partners with my friend and work on it together. Since I had come up with the initial idea, it will likely be that I know more about the business idea than my friend does, so maybe I could come up with ideas and my friend can work on it. I might not have been able to execute the idea without a computer whiz in the first place, so it might have even been a good thing that my friend plagiarized, because he would have practically volunteered to work on my idea.

Plagiarism is generally viewed as a bad thing, but in some cases it might even be a good thing. You might even be able to work with the people who plagiarized your work, because each person has their strengths and weaknesses. And also, if people are only restricted to coming up with original ideas, then the world wouldn't develop, and instead people would have a hard time trying to think of ideas.