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Plagiarism is a prevalent but disturbing subject in academic societies all over the world. Many students today plagiarize past papers as well as various research papers when writing their research papers or assignments. There are even websites that have been established to deal with the sheer need of students for people to help them in locating sources for their academic assignments. There are many websites today that allow students to pay complete strangers to do their assignments for them (Perelman, 128).

Plagiarism was formerly simply referred to as copying. It was still as frowned upon as it is today, but the word plagiarism carries greater weight than the word ‘copying’. Many tertiary institutions punish students who engage in plagiarism; but this has not really dissuaded the practice. In fact, plagiarism appears to be on the rise. ‘Copying’ was not considered to be a serious issue before 1700 A.D. This is because prior to 1700 A.D., any written material that was in existence was not considered to be the personal property of others, but as special messages of God.

Therefore, any person who copied written texts was not considered to be trying to pass another’s work as his own, but just to be imitating the written work. In England, the first law against copying the works of others was passed in 1710 (Kantz, 83). This development is thought to have come about as a result of the developments of the printing press. The Protestant reformation also began to recognize the value of individual ownership. Although there was a lot of objection to the new law outlawing ‘copying’ another’s work, it would become more accepted in the 1890s.

The word ‘plagiarism’ comes from the Latin term “plagiarus” which means “abductor” or “kidnapper”. Even though it is ethically wrong for a person to portray the ideas and concepts of others as his or her own, the laws concerning what constitutes plagiarism are hazy at best. For instance, one would be forced to say that in ghost writing, which is an accepted form of authorship in literary circles, the author that lends his or her name to the ghost writer is ethically wrong if plagiarism is strictly to be defined as taking credit for another’s work.

Additionally, all movie stars who hire writers to write their acceptance speeches, or even politicians with writers in their payroll can also be said to be engaging in a form of plagiarism. This is because in reading their speeches, these celebrated people take credit for another person’s ideas and thoughts by passing these speeches as their own. Another kind of plagiarism that is not penalized in literary circles is “honorary authorship” where an overseer of a laboratory who hardly contributed at all to the research is mentioned in a research paper as a co-author.

Another variety of plagiarism is in government circles where higher ranking officers use documents written for them by their subordinates and pass them off as their own. It is quite unreasonable to stress to students that plagiarism of any kind is wrong and will be penalized when here is a very different reality in the working world. The real world has a serious problem in overlooking different types of plagiarism while students are penalized even for insinuating ideas that their lecturers believe