Why Plagiarism Is Considered an Ambiguous Matter by Many

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Date: March 12, 2018

Plagiarism gets a lot of attention from internet users, especially those whose professions need a lot of knowledge about the matter.

If you are a content writer, graphic designer, website developer or a marketer, you must familiarize yourself with what plagiarism is. Not paying attention to the matter could get you in trouble. Many websites disappear from the search results of search engines and only after getting sent to the bottom they realize that their plagiarized content has done this to them.

With several strict rules

being laid by the search engines against plagiarism, you may wonder why plagiarism is considered an ambiguous matter by many.

Giving an opinion about the matter is quite difficult when you are dealing with plagiarism.

You could say that plagiarism is just as if you were stealing but then there comes self-plagiarism in which you are stopped from using your own material. In short, if you were being accused of stealing for plagiarizing someone’s content, how could you get blamed for using your own content? Aren’t you the owner of your content and shouldn’t you be allowed to use it wherever and whenever you wanted? That’s where plagiarism enters the obscurity and people seem clueless about it.

Another thing that makes

the issue quite equivocal is the plagiarism in website development. Being a website developer, if you have given a particular look, feel and experience to your website with all the hard work, you might as well see another website doing the same thing and presenting the same looks. You might want to deal strictly with this website for stealing your idea but the sad truth is that you can’t. Unless you have access to the website’s code and you see some similarities in the code, you cannot say that this particular website stole your idea.

Then there are times

when a student takes a quotation from some book, speech or a documentary and tries to explain it in his own words and gets caught for plagiarism. Of course, he did a good job of converting the idea in his own words but if similarities are found and credit wasn’t given to the original author for the creation of that idea, this will be considered plagiarism. In short, paraphrasing someone’s work doesn’t mean that you will not be required to cite the source – citation and providing the reference is still just as important here as well.

Students argue a lot on plagiarism

because they are not allowed to even copy content from another student’s notes and this doesn’t seem nice to them. And lastly, there are people who don’t think plagiarism should exist in the first place.

These people are perhaps the most optimistic people with the greatest sense of sharing who don’t think that using another person’s idea without citation is illegal or unethical. However, it doesn’t seem very nice that a project you spent years working on gets a copy and pasted by another person and he ends up getting all the credit for the work.