Why is it so easy to just go on the internet and borrow someone else’s work and claim it as your own
Borrowed knowledge includes compilations created, recorded, and discovered by others. These include such sources as: books, magazines, newspapers, journals, research reports, microforms, dissertations, diaries, pamphlets, films, audio recordings, videotapes and computer data base output. Any information, inference, experience, observation, or experiment made by another and reported or recorded by another falls into this category and must ethically be documented when used. Others’ work must be credited by future users. You cannot claim another’s work as your own whether in part or in whole. Putting others’ work into your own words or quoting it directly without telling others where it came from is plagiarism, an offense likely to get you into serious trouble and likely to make others distrust you in the future.
Now that was borrowed from http://www.umpi.maine.edu/~petress/essay21.pdf
we often don’t think before doing it and very often it’s even a commendable job done on our part to conceal it. But sometimes (when I like to think that I have a conscience) it just doesn’t feel right. Currently I’m coding a software project which requires some piece of “Borrowed wisdom”. Now, that I have gotten over my initial dilemma of whether or not to use it. I am faced with an even greater one turns out that the piece that I did copy was in its own turn copied from another one by someone else.
Are we in our search for knowledge landing up in a cesspool of common human know-how?
Are we in the end only adding just one more piece to the same and claiming glory for all the “Borrowed Pearls” that we did not invent?
Some would claim why re-invent the wheel but then again do we really know who invented the wheel and do we make the effort to acknowledge that in fact the invention of the wheel was a major contribution in what we have done now.
Again some would say that is not possible.
Me well I say who care’s as long the so called façade of human industry in adding pieces to an ever increasing jig-saw puzzle continues…..
