Another perspective on plagiarism: Over recent years I have had a number
of occasions to talk about plagiarism with authors of articles submitted
to the journal that I edited for a time, with tenure review committees,
with faculty who served on panels to review charges against students,
and with both graduate and undergraduate students.  I often found these
discussions distressing and finally came to understand that this was not
simply because of an erosion of standards but also because of a genuine
confusion of issues that sometimes were a result of new technologies.
Many students and some faculty tended to equate plagiarism with theft of
property and in their minds the lifting of sentences from a website was
the equivalent of downloading music without paying.  The people who
would get paid if the downloading was done legally are not the creative
people but the owners of the property. Whether or not this is a correct
interpretation, the creators of the music were themselves seen as
victims of an unfair legal and economic system. Those of us who object
to cutting and pasting sentences were then classified as being
old-fashioned in insisting on proper citation which was often seen as a
waste of time since if we wanted we could easily find the sources or as
defenders of possibly unjustifiable property rights.  While I was not
sympathetic to this point of view, in light of the prices of textbooks
and journal subscriptions I did have some moments in which I had to
question my own views.

My conclusion was that we needed to focus far less on property rights
and far more on the processes of writing sentences and paragraphs and
articles.  Students who do not write their own papers are cheating
themselves because they do not learn how to do so and so don't take full
advantage of the education for which they are paying.  Assistant
professors who submit articles that they did not themselves create are
building false impressions of what they will be able to accomplish in
the future; both they and the departments/colleges/universities that
give them tenure will be unhappy and probably bitter in that future.

Anne Mayhew