Plagiarism

The strange thing about plagiarism is that it's almost always pointless. The writers who stand accused, from Laurence Sterne to Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Susan Sontag, tend to be more talented than the writers they lift from. The well-regarded historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, recently charged with plagiarizing, fit the profile. Ambrose denied plagiarism but pledged to correct the errors in future editions of his latest book. Goodwin's case resulted in a private settlement and more footnotes.

Even their critics couldn't agree on the severity of their infractions. Problem is, as concepts go, plagiarism isn't that old. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson as the first person to use the word plagiary to designate literary theft--and he was making a joke. That was at the beginning of the 17th century, when everyone, including Shakespeare, still borrowed other people's work and remade it. Originality had very little cred before the Romantics inflated it. The increasing prevalence of mass-produced books furthered the problem of plagiarism, too, because then there was something to steal from. The ensuing centuries have