revised

When going about doing a paper, writing a song, creating any sort of work for yourself, you must be sure that when doing so, you are not taking down what others have already stated and using it with your name, giving them no recognition. Plagiarism is a problem in the modern world today because people have their ideas stolen from them daily and published as someone else's. This loses the original owner recognition, and with some things like Malcolm Gladwell stated money. Take for example record companies. They create a song, show part of it to the world as a preview, and a bigger company finds this, puts it in their song, and it becomes famous in a week. The original owner of this piece receives no recognition for his work, and loses all profits that he could have received with the piece he made thanks to plagiarism. There are many instances that this happens Gladwell says, and it is a problem. People steal ideas and diminish the hopes of someone who actually came up with the idea beforehand. It should be something that should be taken more seriously because in modern times, people lose more than just time they put into it, and there should be harsher punishments in schools if students are caught doing so.

Although, can plagiarism really be pinpointed to be correct? The rule is seven consecutive words used in a row show that you took them from another piece of work. But then again what about, say for example, the Beatles from Gladwell’s piece. How can you justify a beat of a song, or lyrics? It doesn’t exactly have a defined line in between plagiarism and just borrowing an idea.

Some types of work being stolen is credited and allowed to happen though. Take Gladwell’s example of breast cancer. He said that let’s say you create a cure for cancer. This cure is allowed to be taken by a variety of different companies because it is, “in society’s interest to let as many people as possible copy your invention.” Some people might get upset that their invention was taken because they might’ve wanted to start a monopoly of some type but this cannot be credited because it’s in the good of the people. Plagiarism is bad, stealing someone’s work without asking is bad, but if in any way you can twist it into your own idea or product, I say this helps the community, and go for it.