The XX Factor: What women really think.

We Are All Plagiarists Now

I've thought a lot about rip-off writers and wondered not only why they steal but why they steal the cheap stuff, lifting boldly and yet at random, like those guys who broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum years ago dressed as Boston cops—and after going to all that trouble, left behind The Titian. (Of course, if you really loved words or art, you wouldn't steal at all, out of pride if not reverence.) My interest goes back to my first reporting job, at the Dallas Morning News, where one of my colleagues was busted for copying the most banal imaginable observations about dating out of a magazine for a feature-section piece on relationships. As this was pre-Internet, she had to work at getting caught and went so far as to leave the magazine she'd lifted from open on her desk, where its discovery led to her dismissal. Along with the rest of the staff, I joined in endless speculation about why she'd do that when walking outside the building and interviewing the first person who happened by would have been so much easier. (This was before she wrote a best-selling book about the depression that drove her to it and was hired by The New Yorker.)     

Google has long since made getting caught inevitable, of course. And mostly that's not only a positive development, but one that makes the question of why anyone would do this, knowing how the story would end, all the more interesting. But while volume is up, quality has suffered, and some of these recent plagiarism cases are iffy at best: Goeglein's is a classic of the genre; why would a lovely guy with a great job appropriate material for guest columns he was under no pressure to submit—and didn't get paid for—in his hometown paper in Fort Wayne, Indiana? Now that is one worth mulling. But Obama's failure to consistently credit his friend Deval Patrick with a line he fed him? As scandals go, that's pitiful. And with all due respect, Jack, that Times reporter who scribbled down the definition of the illegal drug he was writing about and then popped it into his story without bothering to rewrite the sentence? If we damn that guy, we're rewriting the definition of plagiarism.