Plagiarism Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Plagiarism - Research Paper Example People may differ as to what constitutes the act of plagiarism but there is a general consensus on the undesirability of it in the academic world. The need to acknowledge the work of the person from whom an idea or a passage of words originated is accepted as a fair one by the academic and non-academic fraternity, most of all, to protect their own interests. Writers like Judy Anderson talk of the exclusivity that writers need as the cause for plagiarism being recognized as a crime. This need for exclusivity is intrinsically linked to the idea of intellectual property and the need that writers feel to protect their creations, which may stem from reasons that may be economic or ethical. This crime is directed against this need for exclusivity that writers feel (Anderson, ix). This is tied in with the idea that the work of art is similar to the offspring of the author and any attempt to appropriate the content created by the author is similar to an attempt to violate the maternal instinct of the author. This authorial-maternal instinct, while it destabilizes notions of masculinity and femininity and the instinct of the mother that is conventionally considered to be characteristic of only women, is something that is common to most writers, big and small. These writers are able to bring out the point from the perspective of both the writer and the reader. While the writer feels as if he or she is being deprived of his right of exclusive ownership, the reader of a modern world is likely to feel that the text that he or she reads is recreated or even created by him, in the context of the erasure of the author in the pro cess of providing a text with meaning. This theory, which was propounded by the French literary critic, Roland Barthes, places the onus of processing the meaning of a text, on the reader of the text and not the writer. This, while