The Philippine Online Chronicles

What is Plagiarism? Is it theft? Theft of what? What exactly is lost? Who loses it? What exactly is gained? Who gains it? Art is theft: an author steals the best of another and calls it Tradition. There’s nothing worth saying that hasn’t been said before. Plagiarism is Quotation without the quotation marks. Referencing without Crediting. A claiming of the public culture for the personal self. Irreverent tribute in the Shrine of Sacrilege.

What is Plagiarism? It is the Grade-A Felony in the society steeped in the commodification of Ideas, ways of thinking, words, its only real crime in the economic if not the academic. Are my ideas so new they have to be patented? Is my way of thinking so distinct it has to be memorialised? Are my words really my own? Why put such a high price on Originality? Why put such a high price on Originality in the age of Link Aggregation, Creative Commons, Ctrl-X and –V? By changing the context, you change the connotation. Abandon the fetish of Originality: we have been conditioned to the idea of words as property – one’s “very own words,” the Tyranny of the Written Word, of ink on paper – and consequently to a deep repugnance for the black sin of Plagiarism. Originality is the Great Virtue, but take it out of the economic and academic paradigms and place it firmly on culture at large, Originality is effectively worthless. What only matters is Authenticity – it’s the thought that counts – the genuity of sentiments, the accessibility of the message, the relative ease to reappropriate it.

What is Plagiarism? It is nothing new. Distracted by Craft, it is the sleight-of-hand in the production of Literature of Easy Sentiments – the Hallmark card, the ad campaign, the graduation commencement speech – ease of meaning has always been the name of the game: “A man of simple pleasures is a man content,” “Naranasan mo na ba ang lumangoy sa dagat ng basura?,” “This is the first day of the rest of your life.” And as we slowly find ourselves writing and reading in a world increasingly constrained by time and space and considerations of various subject positions, we are tasked to compress and compact our hard-earned truths and our hard-earned meanings and the hard-earned meanings of our hard-earned truths into searchable linkable quotable quotes in a bid to regain/remain in relevance to the reading populace, a necessary compromise that allows us to be easily understood by the most number of people possible and to have them comforted, affirmed, agreeable. The aesthetic appreciation of the aphorism, upgraded for the internet: the strength of the message is in its Google ranking, the medium in its ease of use and comprehension, as long as the emotions ring as authentic and true. Plagiarism is an art form. A way of seeing and believing. It is just another word for "Many loved before us, I know we are not new."

What is Plagiarism? Homage is just Plagiarism in Influence’s clothing. Art begets art. Writers work with words just as painters work with colours. Where do these words come from? Conversations heard and overheard, movies and radio broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, and yes, other writers. Look at the surrealist moustache on the Mona Lisa. Irreverent? Vandalism? Just a silly joke? Consider where this joke can lead. The same applies to writing. Kidnap someone else’s characters and put them in a different set: the whole gamut of painting, writing, music, film is yours to use. It happens all the time – how many times have we had Romeo and Juliet served up to us? So let’s come out in the open with it and steal freely. Words, colours, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. What is Plagiarism? Is it theft? Theft of what? What exactly is lost? Who loses it? What exactly is gained? Who gains it? Are our words really our own? Everything belongs to everyone. Steal everything in sight.

Phototheft from here and here and here.

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