Plagiarism - the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own (Oxford American Dictionary)

Plagiarism is bad. We all know about it. I know, and you know, and that guy over there knows. But is it really bad in any case? Are there some situations when plagiarism is normal and even good? Is plagiarism a crime? Should we all plagiarize from time to time? These are the questions I’d like to raise in my essay.

Being a musician I have first-hand knowledge of plagiarism. Here and there and everywhere musicians are plagiarizing. Artists use music, manner of singing or playing musical instruments, style or even stage images of other popular artists. For example every of three albums of our Russian band "Jane Air” is a style-based copies of three albums of an American band "My Chemical Romance”, of course, in my humble opinion. MCR’s first album "I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love” of 2002 is a piece of quite a hard emo-alternative rock, and Jane Air’s first of-the-same-name album of 2004 is practically the same. After that, in 2004 My Chemical Romance release their second album "Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge”, which is far softer and far more emotional that the first one, and what do you think? In 2006 our Russian guys release their "Pere-Lachaise”, which have practically the same style. And finally the third Jane Air’s album "Sex & Violence”, which was released in 2007, is practically a style-copy of the third album of the American band, which was released in 2006, is called "The Black Parade” and can be described as dark punk. And it’s only the one example. Another one is that our Russian pop-rock band "Ranetki” is trying to copy Beatles themselves! But I actually don’t want you to think that Russian musicians are all plagiarists, the examples are just very vivid.

But I can say that sometimes plagiarism can really be a random coincidence. For example – one day I was walking down the street and a very nice song appeared in my head! I thought it through, memorized it, then I came to my band and said to the guitarist:”Hey dude, check that stuff, here you play like this, and I play like that and bla-bla-bla…”! He heard me out, and then said with quite a sarcastic smile: "Nice, proper nice… By the way, have you heard the last album by …”, and named the album of the band I have never listened to! And it turned out that my song is the song from that album! Of course we decided not to work this song out, but it was a kind of disappointment for me. That song was MY OWN intellectual property and I had to give it up only because it was written by a famous band earlier than I did that… Here is the question – is it a plagiarism or a coincidence? Nobody can say for sure.

Plagiarism exists not only in music. You can find it in book writing, in poetry, in different arts such as handmade, painting, cinema, etc. There are also some laws about the plagiarism but they of course do not work properly.  Practically in any case plagiarism might be made out to be a cover, or parody. Plagiarism cannot be totally suppressed and prosecuted at law by the matter is that plagiarism disparages the merit of the plagiarist himself, because if he steals other people’s thoughts, ideas, style or language his lack of talent and ideology are taken for granted.

 But the medal always has two sides. And the second side is that in our time it’s very hard, and even impossible to write, invent or paint something, which wasn’t written, invented or painted earlier by another artist. Earlier it was a big problem for people to invent something, and now it is a very serious and hard goal to invent something without copying yet-existing ideas. 21-st century is really a very hard time for every creative person. It’s even not a very easy task for me to write that essay without surfing the internet for some ideas, but I still control my temper! =) Everything is devised yet and you can do nothing about it. And it’s quite natural that every musician, painter, poet, writer, scientist, designer or stage director draws inspiration from other people’s works. I, for example, listen to hundreds of bands of different styles, watch videos with different drummers and take something useful for myself in every of them. And a novice stage-director can, for example, shoot a movie under the influence of a famous and old one, which was shot by his idol. It’s normal to create something under the impression of other artists, but every artist should and must perfect his style and skills and one day, he will become an idol for someone, and his works would be plagiarized. But it’s p a pity that there are plenty of artists who stop at stealing ideas, but as people say, "Only God can judge them”.

To generalize it all I can say that there is no effective way to stop plagiarism, except explaining to people that stealing is a crime, and stealing thoughts is a crime  not only against morality, it’s against yourself! Passing someone else’s ideas off as your own can never bring honor, popularity or money; it can only cause mockery, disrespect and reproaches. But plagiarism is not always bad and blameworthy as I’ve mentioned. So, to crown it all – there is always the correct place, time and measure for everything, even for plagiarism, but we must remember that every human being exists here to introduce his or her OWN contribution in, as I call it, World’s Intellectual Bank. How would we live if people were plagiarizing all the time? We’d still been sitting round the fire wrapping ourselves in mammoth’s fell, or even we weren’t, because nobody had invented fire or hunting. And here is the formula – the less we plagiarize – the more beautiful, convenient, modern, interesting and vivid our life is!