In the arts
The history of the arts
Through all of the history of literature and of the arts in general, works of art are for a large part repetitions
of the tradition; to the entire history of artistic creativity belong plagiarism, literary theft, appropriation,
incorporation, retelling, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, reprise, thematic variation, ironic retake, parody,
imitation, stylistic theft, pastiches, collages, and deliberate assemblages. There is no rigorous and precise
distinction between practices like imitation, stylistic plagiarism, copy, replica and forgery. These
appropriation procedures are the main axis of a literate culture, in which the tradition of the canonic past is
being constantly rewritten.
Ruth Graham quotes T.S. Eliot—"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. Bad poets deface what they take."—she
notes that despite the "taboo" of plagiarism, the ill-will and embarrassment it causes in the modern context,
readers seem to often forgive the past excesses of historic literary offenders.
Praisings of artistic plagiarism
A passage of Laurence Sterne's 1767 Tristram Shandy, condemns plagiarism by resorting to plagiarism. Oliver
Goldsmith commented:
Sterne's Writings, in which it is clearly shewn, that he, whose manner and style were so long thought original,
was, in fact, the most unhesitating plagiarist who ever cribbed from his predecessors in order to garnish his own
pages. It must be owned, at the same time, that Sterne selects the materials of his mosaic work with so much art,
places them so well, and polishes them so highly, that in most cases we are disposed to pardon the want of
originality, in consideration of the exquisite talent with which the borrowed materials are wrought up into the new
form.
In other contexts
On the Internet
Free online tools are becoming available to help identify plagiarism, and there are a range of approaches
that attempt to limit online copying, such as disabling right clicking and placing warning banners regarding
copyrights on web pages. Instances of plagiarism that involve copyright violation may be addressed by the rightful
content owners sending a DMCA removal notice to the offending site-owner, or to the ISP that is hosting the
offending site. The term "content scraping" has arisen to describe the copying and pasting of information from
websites and blogs.