Anne Mayhew wrote:
"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.  ... 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 ..."


This saddens me greatly.

I suspect that it flows from viewing ideas as "information."  But ideas
aren't just information.  Ideas have histories and relations to other ideas.
By ripping them out of these contexts, the plagiarist falsifies history and
degrades thought.

That's something wholly different from, and far more important than,
property rights.  I suspect that the reduction of plagiarism to theft arose
because most students (and others) don't have the background to appreciate
or even understand "ideas have histories and relations to other ideas."  So,
when speaking to them about plagiarism, teachers chose to justify opposition
to plagiarism in a way they could appreciate and understand.

Andrew Kliman