Saying "Plagiarism is wrong because the government said so" is already a dead argument.

This brings up something interesting, that depending on the government probably has enabled plagiarism.

As it stands now, acts of plagiarism by unknown bloggers is off the radar of the government's black and white solution of copyright laws. It's not like we expect them to do anything about little blog posts. So to whatever extent we depend on the government and don't think about ways to police it ourselves, it works to the plagiarizer's advantage.

When we do it ourselves there's ACTUALLY a mechanism to police it where it's wrong, and to allow nuance and various opinions where there might be room to explore and grey area to think about.

I think ultimately when you plagiarize you victimize yourself. If I post another person's work and try to pass it off as my own, I'll hurt my credibility and then going forward when I post something that's really mine, people will assume some % likelihood that it's plagiarized.

On centralized websites like YouTube etc they can create whatever rules and penalties they think are best. The decentralized solution (which is all that matters going forward), I think, is that people judge you for it and in the long run it's never best to do it.

I do think there is nuance. Like using someone's song to improve upon it, to try a remix or something and crediting the original creator, seems like an appropriate use of another person's content. (And that's what we miss out on today with the government solution. It's illegal for you or me to add some new twist to a famous song, at least not without paying Sony a boat load of money.) That's just my opinion though, whatever emerges from the hive mind as fair and appropriate is all that really matters.

Cool article and a cool topic to get into.