Plagiarism is Everyone’s Business and Business is Good

“The concept of plagiarism, however, is learned in more specialized contexts of practice entered into only by a few; it’s hard to get from the notion that you shouldn’t appropriate your neighbor’s car to the notion that you should not repeat his words without citing him.”
-Stanley Fish tries to make the argument that plagiarism is an “insider’s issue” for academics and specialists. Stanley Fish is totally missing the fact that there’s been a worldwide exponential explosion in the number of authors and publishers in the last 15 years. Now word and idea theft is everyone’s business-and it’s big business, from social media to classrooms to gaming to content farms.