Plagiarism. It's the bane of every writer's existence. As a writer, it's a difficult thing to face, particularly in professional writing. After all, sometimes a fantastic idea for a story will end up on the shelf collecting dust because you discover your awesome original idea was published back in 1879. Or you think you've come up with the perfect argument for or against something only to learn the arguments have all been made before. It's disheartening as a writer to learn that an idea is not as original as it seems, but the line between similarity and outright theft are actually easier to understand than one might think.
Similarities in writing are common place, and often enough easy to recognize. After all, writers inspire each other all the time. Outright theft, however, is something slightly different. As adults, we've been trained to recognize the word "plagiarism" and associate it with someone copying someone else's text word for word. But despite this few recognize it for what it is: theft. A plagiarist is a thief, stealing the words written by someone else for their own selfish purposes. A simple quote or excerpt is not plagiarism, so long as it is identified and proper credit is given. But appropriating copyrighted material and claiming it as one's own is theft. This is why it's so heavily penalized in academic circles.
Plagiarism most often rears its ugly head in scientific and journalistic writing. A paper is published by a scientist in Germany about the effects of climate change on the evolution of a butterfly. Within an hour, that paper has been downloaded, uploaded, copied and plagiarized by seven different people. Within a day, a hundred people have appropriated that scientist's work for various purposes and none give credit where it's due. As a writer, plagiarism is the worst form of insult. I've had people who don't understand ask if it isn't some kind of back-handed compliment that my work would be copied like that. While I understand where they are coming from, I can't possibly agree. If I spend days, weeks, months or years writing something, it's a labor of love. It's a carefully crafted, polished and toned piece of literary art. I have poured myself into it, sacrificing time, energy and sleep in order to see it through to its conclusion.
And then someone else just comes along using copy-paste and takes credit for all my hard work. It takes no effort on the part of the thief to do this, and by doing so they are benefiting from my labor without compensating me adequately. By stealing my work, the thief has also stolen the income I would have gained from its use and the notoriety I could have garnered from its recognition. It directly impacts my livelihood, and the livelihood of every single writer out there from journalists to novelists. If I had a nickel for every time someone tried to convince me plagiarism isn't actually theft I would be able to retire at 40. Unfortunately for those who don't see it that way, plagiarism is theft. The theft of intellectual property is just as painful and damaging as the theft of physical property, and much harder to recover from.