Creative Plagiarism
I miss the old days – you know, when you knew what plagiarism looked like. You could identify it, label it, deal with it. Nowadays, plagiarism is veiled in a blanket of reworded content. Kathy Kerhli shows us one example of today’s rampant plagiarism and copyright infringement – wonder how a court would handle this?

What’s more upsetting to me is how this will affect the next generation of journalists. It’s bad enough that today’s generation (and to be honest, some from every generation) doesn’t appear to hold the same ethical standard on use of copyrighted material as they should. But how will they as an industry respond to this regurgitated content, lifted prose, reworded information that clearly belongs to someone else? Is it going to take having their own work stolen for the current and future journalists to get angry enough to take action? Will it even matter to them?

My own daughter heads off to college this weekend to start her studies in communications and new media. I pray that there’s at least one ethics course that she and her classmates must sit through. She’s heard it preached by me until her ears are raw, but when the rules keep changing and the ethical lines are blurred, how will she and her generation know right from wrong if no one is there standing up for ethics?