Um outro lado da questão [via]:
I Am a Plagiarist: My sin is more like that of George Harrison, who was successfully sued for cribbing his song "My Sweet Lord" from an earlier hit by the Chiffons, "He's So Fine." Just like me, Harrison claimed ? more credibly than Viswanathan ? that any similarities between his work and another's were unintended and unconscious. Nonetheless, the judge's ruling against him was unequivocal: "His subconscious knew it already had worked in a song his conscious did not remember... That is, under the law, infringement of copyright, and is no less so even though subconsciously accomplished."
I find all of this rather scary. I don't claim to have a photographic memory, but my mind is stuffed full of graphic design, graphic design done by other people. How can I be sure that any idea that comes out of that same mind is absolutely my own? Writing in Slate, Joshua Foer reports that after Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism, she was virtually paralyzed. "I have ever since been tortured by the fear that what I write is not my own," said Keller. "For a long time, when I wrote a letter, even to my mother, I was seized with a sudden feeling, and I would spell the sentences over and over, to make sure that I had not read them in a book." The challenge is even more pronounced in design, where we manipulate more generalized visual forms rather than specific sequences of words.
In the end, accusations of plagiarism are notoriously subjective, and some people who have seen my piece and Kunz's side by side have said they're quite different. You can judge for yourself.
[act.: Copycat publishers in plagiarism hitman's sights: Theft of journalists' work is exploding on the internet thanks to a new wave of automated story-copying software - but news organisations are not equipped to tackle the problem, according to one reporter carving a niche as the web's anti-plagiarism crusader.
Conventional forms of plagiarism, in which writers poach one another's words, resurfaced recently after washingtonpost.com fired its right-wing blogger for the offence and an unproven claim brought against Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown was heard in court. But now online marketers are harvesting journalists' work to boost their visibility, says Jonathan Bailey, editor of Plagiarism Today, a weblog rapidly gaining popularity with victims seeking help. [...]
Mr Bailey advises journalists to create Google Alerts for key phrases in their stories and to request removal of their copied work from web hosts and search services if wayward publishers refuse to remove the material themselves. ]
