Plagiarism is “a copy of another person’s ideas, words or work and pretend that they are your own”. If I hadn’t put commas on the both sides of this quotation from Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, it could be considered as plagiarism, as I would seem to set up this phrase for my own, and that would be no good. Plagiarism is not a simple thing to discover, as in some cases the owner does nothing to protect his rights, in other ones nobody knows that it was plagiarized.

There is a synonymous word for plagiarism. It is “piracy” that is fully spread in Russia, for example. Still, some differences between these two notions can be found. The main feature of plagiarism is that of misappropriation of author's rights, while “piracy” is a misappropriate usage, copying and publishing of, for example, some work of fiction or a film. Lenin once said that “art belongs to people”, and, to my mind, this is the credo of people, who earn their money by “piracy”. There is even a joke: “If you have licensed operating system in the USA, you are a normal law-abiding citizen. If you have a licensed OS in Russia, you show off”. It will always bу easier to by cheap CD-s with films instead of the licensed ones, which are in ten times more expensive, while we don’t have normal laws, punishment and services in Russia to prevent both “piracy” and plagiarism.

The idea of plagiarism, as I said, is something vague. The coincidence of separate ideas can’t be called plagiarism, as all author’s ideas are based on some other ones, which were created or developed earlier. That’s why the matter of plagiarism is not in the ideas, but in the shape of them. For instance, all writers al over the world wrote and write about love. Are they plagiarists as they use one and the same subject? No, I’d like to say. But if one of them writes let it be sonnets in Shakespearian way, using the same words and rhythm, he can be called a plagiarist. Still, plagiarism is sometimes a question of double meaning.

We live in times, when there is a lot of information for each subject and aspect of life, science, etc. It’s very hard to stop yourself from copying other works, when you have to write an article or a report without having many ideas to write about. The Internet gives a wonderful opportunity to do this as most of the sites don’t have a protection from copying of the information given. Usually the creators of these web pages themselves have copied their passages from somewhere else. However, your copying will not make you any good. As there are plenty of cases of plagiarism, there are a lot of programs that can help editors, academic supervisors and teachers to check the information they are given. Most of the programs hardly can be cheated, so it’s better not to risk your own reputation and copy somebody else’s words.

Once I faced up with the case of plagiarism in my life. It was not a very pleasant experience, I should say. Once, two couples before the English one of my group mates came to me and ask my note-book with home assignments. She promised me just to look through today’s home tasks for she had no ideas what to speak about concerning one tasks. As I’m rather naïve and kind, I gave her my note-book with my own thoughts upon the subject we were going to discuss later during the class. How surprised and upset I was, when the teacher asked this very group mate of mine before me and she read MY answer word-in-word! It was absolute plagiarism. Since then, I seldom give tasks to copy or warn the copying person to change my ideas in his own way and not to plagiarize.

Everybody knows that plagiarism is penal action. We have a special law even in Russia that the one, who has rights on a book or plot, can have any profit from it, as free selling. And the person, who illegally, without any mark of the author’s rights or, the worst case, with appropriation of these rights to himself, uses the material, has to pay for his deeds. Still, it is only a law on a paper, and in most cases there are even no trials in such cases in Russia. But, for example, in America, people obey the law. However, I want to tell you about one case between Russia and America, unfortunately, without happy end. Everybody knows the recent film, Avatar, which was very popular around the world. But few people know that almost the whole plot of it was taken from the book “Mir poludnya” of our Russian fantast-writer Strugatski. The talks with the director of the “Avatar”, James Cameron, were senseless. Our writer got nothing for his pains (written with the help of the material from www.rb.ru). It was a great offence for me, as a fan of our Russian fiction.

When we speak about plagiarism, it is impossible not to mention such thing as copyright. It is a form of protection of private property, particularly intellectual. There is no person, who hasn’t seen even once the sign of copyright - ©. It is everywhere, on every label and brand mark. This symbolizes that this product is somebody else’s and its illegal usage will be punished. All people are jealous to share their property.

So, in order not to be accused of plagiarism and get in a bad situation or, moreover, pay much money, you should not use the thoughts and words of other people without making them quotations (I mean, commas and reference to the author). It’s better to strain your own brains and produce something new instead of foolish copy-pasting.