Honorable Plagiarism

"Don't plagiarize" - this message is drilled into every student in school and college. With abundance of information and increasingly easier and smarter ways of finding that information and match it to your needs, it is becoming more and more difficult to adhere to this even as teachers are doing their best to use smarter software to detect plagiarism.

However, everyone 'copies' - be it a Bollywood music lifted (or as the artists say - 'inspired') from earlier works or even major innovations like the one witnessed via the Apple vs. Samsung battle. So, with copying of intellectual information happening all around us, the line is getting blurrier on what is considered plagiarism and what would be an acceptable 'inspiration'.

Working in the Content Management space, this particular issue crosses work and life for me, as part of an effective content management solution is in securing intellectual property so that only right content is available to the right person at the right time. In addition, the issue of "plagiarism" becomes all the more confusing (and critical) in the IT consulting space where we are generally compared to 'bees pollinating flowers'. We move across companies, working at different projects. While there are well-defined guidelines in terms of what we can and cannot take from an organization once the project is completed, putting a restriction on what the consultant internalizes and potentially uses that as an inspiration in another project becomes more murky, unless we have a Men In Black style pen that would erase memory when leaving a project!

My general take is that we are a sum of our influences and our environment. So every action we perform (book we read, music we hear, person we listen to, etc.) will inevitably tend to have its mark something that we may create down the road. So, the best we can do is to ensure that we use the essence of an idea infused with our own thoughts rather than make a copy of something that exists and worse, without attributing it to where it came from.

With that said, I was pleasantly surprised when I read my recent book - "Steal Like an artist by Austin McKleon".



The premise of the book is that there is nothing new to create - everything has been created already. So, all we can do is to read and experience and get influenced by many things and  then come up with our own "remix" or "interpretation". This especially resonated with me, as I recalled a verse in Mahabharatha:

yad iha asti tad sarvatra yad na iha asti na tat kvacit |

imaM samasta-vij~jAna-shAstra-koshaM vidur-budhAH || (thanks Vasu)

"Whatever is here is mentioned everywhere else, and whatever is not here cannot be anywhere else.
This, the wise consider to be the complete collection of science and scriptures."

The book itself seems to be part motivational and part pragmatic, but the author does a pretty good job of balancing the two and not making it sound too preachy or 'self-help-y'. While most of the content is one that you may already have known (evidenced by the many "that's what I'm talking about" moments I had while reading), I think it's still worth a read as he puts them together nicely, supplemented by a number of quotes from famous thinkers/artists/philosophers.

It's a pretty small book (I read the whole thing in two to three hours) and fairly inexpensive and lends itself to giving it away to others easily.

So, at the end, what is the difference between plagiarism and inspiration? I will quote the book in this regard.

Good Theft	Bad Theft
Honor	Degrade
Study	Skim
Steal from many	Steal from one
Credit	Plagiarize
Transform	Imitate
Remix	Rip off

Plagiarism transforms to inspiration if you - "reference many places; go deep into links; understand the concepts; summarize in your own words; cite your sources; augment with examples from your experience."