Blog Assignment 5

In Malcolm Gladwell's essay "Something Borrowed," he talks about plagiarism and he explains that copying someone else’s work is not what matters, but what you copy, how much of the piece of work you copy, and why you copied it. He first starts out by introducing Dorothy Lewis, a psychiatrist that works with serial killers. Dorothy wrote a book and eventually finds out that her "life" was stolen by Bryony Lavery, a British play writer, when she wrote the play "Frozen." Gladwell then talks about plagiarism in the music industry and processes music producers have to go through in order to write their own music. Some music artists have become mad about people stealing a medley from a piece without permission, but in reality it wasn't stealing at all. They simply wrote a song of their own using the same key notes. What Gladwell was saying is that the notes were not stolen because they weren't anyone's original work. Lavery thought that Lewis' work was news. She didn't think she was doing anything wrong by using what she had learned.

I liked this article by Gladwell. It was a little confusing her and there and I'm still not sure I understand what her was trying to say about plagiarism, but he had many good points. Personally, before reading this, I thought that plagiarism was plagiarism and that if you didn't give credit to your source then it was stealing. I didn't realize that there was another way to look at it. I guess it confused me a little about what is right and what is wrong when it comes to plagiarism.