Plagiarism Definitions

Rutgers’ policy on academic integrity defines plagiarism as the use of another person’s words, ideas, or results without giving that person appropriate credit.

In “Give All”, Lethem has the quote “People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves… But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place,” and this exemplifies how Lethem actually views plagiarism in a positive light, and a little differently than the standard Rutgers definition of plagiarism. Hence, the title “Influence of Ecstasy”. Lethem uses the term as something that everybody has to do… because no idea is original. So instead of fighting over what intellectual property is mine and what is yours, which just ends up hurting the collective public imagination and general public, we should be more open to sharing because nothing we create is truly ours.

Lethem consistently uses examples like these to show that plagiarism is not as immoral as we regard it to be. However Rutgers is more strict in that if you use another person's idea in your own work, you must cite and quote. But Lethem is talking more about copyright and creators not being able to use other peoples' ideas in their own original work.