Plagiarism Definition

The following passion gives Lethem’s main idea about plagiarism:

“The kernel, the soul-let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances-is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born on the superstition that he has inated them: whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament” (Letem 224-225)

This passage is the essence of what plagiarism is in Lethem’s eyes. It differs from Rutgers Universities definition of plagiarism because he argues that all ideas, innovation and novelty is derivative of someone else's work, and nothing truly can be “original”. The “little discoloration” is essentially the slight differences or improvements in an idea/technology that may make it seem original to the one who amended it, but in reality all work is largely based off of the work of thousands of people in the past. So much so, that giving appropriate credit is not only impractical, but impossible; Rutgers definition emphasizes giving credit to the person’s “words, ideas, or results”, but Lethem argues this is impossible because all our work is the result of “copying” and amending thousands of people’s (an years worth of) work. Lethem believes copying one another's idea and improving the ideas will be most beneficial to the public domain, but the Rutgers policy strictly condemns and prohibits such action.