Plagiarism

Once again, Malcolm Gladwell has written a provocative and endlessly interesting article, this time on the subject of plagiarism. A quote:

When I worked at a newspaper, we were routinely dispatched to "match" a story from the Times: to do a new version of someone else's idea. But had we "matched" any of the Times' words -- even the most banal of phrases -- it could have been a firing offense. The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.