Plagiarism Has Consequences
It is YOUR work! And you are worth much more than plagiarizing someone else
12.5 billion dollars (http://www.riaa.com/faq.php) is lost each year due to illegal downloading. Would you want that to be your song and your money? Numerous highly paid journalists have been dismissed from their extremely high paying jobs, even at places such as the New York Times. (Jason Blair was one of those well-known employees. ) Would you want that to be you?.
When you succeed at creating a unique composition, piece of artwork, or even journal an article for a newspaper - you want to call it your own. As soon as any unique creation is complete, it is the property of the owner. It is automatically copyrighted, and that is true of your work. NY Times Journalist states it so brilliantly in an article entitled Journalists Dancing on the Edge of Truth:
"It all comes down to execution. If I attribute the reporting of others and manage to steer clear of proprietary intellectual property while making a cogent argument, then I can live to write another day.
If, on the other hand, I manufacture or manipulate quotes or fail to process the work of others through my own thinking and writing, then the Web — a crowd-sourced scrutiny machine — will find me out. My column will become a spectacle and I will end up in my boss's office explaining myself."1
Think about it. You don't want to end up in the principal's office, or your future boss's office trying to explain why your words sound so similar to someone else's work while it remains uncited in your paper.
1Article Journalists Dancing on the Edge of Truth, NY Times media , August 19, 2012 . Accessed November 13, 2012 from the NYtimes.com <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/business/media/journalists-plagiarism-jonah-lehrer-fareed-zakaria.html?adxnnl=1&ref=plagiarism&adxnnlx=1355418348-c9pad+nRDKNRpSbP+71L0Q>
