The authors of both passages discuss:
A
accusations of plagiarism in the real world
B
rival conceptions of what defines plagiarism
C
the differences between plagiarism and originality
D
a belief that plagiarists should not be punished
Passage 1
Nearly every school in the world bans plagiarism. And while every student understands that plagiarism is wrong, a growing number of educators have suggested that students are confused about what it actually is. Can we really blame them?
Plagiarism is typically defined as taking someone else’s work or ideas and attempting to pass them off as one’s own, without citing the original author. For schools, this usually means that a student cuts and pastes sentences from another writer’s work. Students should understand not to do this. However, plagiarism could also mean that a student takes another line of thought and pretends that he or she came up with it on his or her own. And that is where it gets very confusing for students. They are unsure of exactly what constitutes an original thought. For instance, if they make an argument in a paper, how can they be sure that they are the first to make that argument? This is especially frustrating, because they can actually assume that they are not the first to make any argument. Very little novelty can actually be applied to Ulysses or an essay about the War of 1812. Most academic subjects have been overanalyzed by previous generations. Thus, issues of plagiarism tend to boil down to something very subtle: not originality of thought but originality of presentation.
Passage 2
In the last decade, Bob Dylan has been accused of stealing lines from other writers’ works. Bloggers and various Dylan devotees (and there are millions of people obsessed with him) found striking similarities between some of his song lyrics and passages from an obscure Japanese memoir called Confessions of a Yakuza. Later, the same people accused him of stealing lines from poems by Henry Timrod, a poet who died nearly 150 years ago, But, while he likely did take some lines from various sources and presented them as his own, is this actually theft?
In a word, no. There is a great difference between plagiarism and artistic quoting. Jazz and folk music both have a long tradition of sampling sections of earlier songs. In fact, some of Dylan’s best-known “original” hits are based on early folk melodies. For instance, “Blowin’ in the Wind” uses more or less the same melody as “No More Auction Block,” an old slave song. For an artist of any kind, pure originality is impossible. What makes something original is the way its various parts are put together to make a new whole.