Happy Thing of the Day!
I received a book I mooched on bookmooch recently, and in the envelope there was a note! It said:

Your Book
With Compliments
(username)
Enjoy! I have used the cheapest method of postage and recycled packaging to save money and help save the planet. I always get Proof of Posting.

In retrospect, what the note says isn't very interesting, but I love it when people take extra time to be nice to the moocher. I also love it when people use recycled packaging :D The person sent the book to me from the uk, and international mail is so much more exotic. And of course who doesn't love getting packages in the mail?

[this sounds incredibly canned, but] What was your happy moment today?

Moving on.

I feel guilty about copying off other people's homework, when I haven't done mine. It feels like I am insulting the time and effort this person spent to write his answer, and passing the homework off as my own time and effort. However, I don't really mind letting someone copy off me, especially if it didn't take a lot of work. (heh.) Or if the answers are stock answers, like in Bio or Chem.

But I get really cheesed if someone looks at my essay that I am proud of, and tries (usually miserably) to use my ideas. The result usually looks really forced and fake, so it would look much better if the copier at least used his own ideas and then actually knows what he is talking about. Sometimes people copy from me because they aren't sure of their own ideas or whether their arguments are valid or not, so they would much rather copy and get a good grade rather than risk showing his own work and get a bad grade.

Once, in english class, we were supposed to do peer marking. I happened to receive a paragraph that looked awfully like something I had written before, but obviously it wasn't mine. It turned out that a classmate who wasn't confident of her own work read an earlier essay of mine, and simply rephrased my points and put them in her paragraph. She wasn't even aware she plagiarised just to get a better grade. It's so annoying because I took time to craft the paragraph and think of an original take to the question, and then she just had to take it and pretend the ideas were hers.

Discussing this issue on a larger scale, plagiarism is at its worse when grants are at stake. Someone could chance upon a fellow researchers' work, manipulate it, generate results, and if his paper was published first, the copier would get credit for the discovery, not the person who really thought about the breakthrough.

This is part of the reason why I like the term "Intellectual Property" , because although ideas are intangible products, this term makes ideas a commodity that belongs to its owner. The owner then gets appropriate credit for his work, and isn't sold out on the time and hard work spent.