“Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.” And let’s, first and foremost, give the credit to Guy Debord for saying so about plagiarism before the famous Marxist starts shifting in his grave. Actually I am reminded of the dreaded ‘P’ word once again after ‘Twilight’ author Stephenie Meyer got accused (for the second time) of lifting passages from an ignored book ‘The Nocturne’ written by someone who likes to call herself Jordon Scott. And I don’t want to make anyone feel inferior if that’s the impression one gets!

All this makes me wonder why is it that only a famous creative work has to face the flak of being unoriginal? Frankly, we never came across stuff that was bad and then got accused of being stolen. Now that’s a thought we should really ponder upon. Many would say that it’s the simple human tendency to ride the coattails of anything successful. One can’t deny that everyone from Shakespeare to T.S. Eliot to Dan Brown have been targeted for not using their ‘own’ ideas in their books that we know to be such tremendous successes. In fact, one critic once put, “If this is plagiarism, perhaps we need more of it”, on Shakespearean works.

By the way, did you know that as much plagiarism might be an academic crime, if accused you can’t be taken to law unless you infringe a copyrighted material. And the latter means actually taking ‘word to word’ from somebody else’s work. If you sit back and think, you will realise that all that was original probably happened in the times of Adam because even the lives that we lead today might just be an imitation of somebody else in the world. Please do not think that I am trying to promote stealing of creativity. All I am saying is that inspiration happens and one cannot and should not deny that. Let me quote William Ralph Inge here, “Originality is undetected plagiarism.”

And since plagiarism is such a fickle issue, maybe that is why we do not have any strict laws to tackle this ‘creativity doubt’. There have been plenty of occasions when writers about to gain fame have fallen out of favour when accused of plagiarism like Kaavya Vishwanathan of ‘How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life’ fame and the subsequent plagiarism mess.

The whole issue is open-ended because didn’t our teacher tell us when we were kids that cheating is bad; but then, what if you too wanted to write the story of an orphan who one day comes to know that he has magical powers! Now that might just be illegal because of the huge success that Harry Potter is. My point exactly!

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