[GrumpyOldMan]

Originally Posted by MandoMan

That’s nice to see. It is so common in journalism. Read half a dozen news stories about the same event in secondary-level newspapers and the story on which they base their stories and you will usually find several at least that use phrases or sentences without quotation marks or citing sources. This happens in movie reviews, too—if not with exact words, then with opinions.

I did a lot of scholarly writing in my academic career, and I was always scrupulous with sources. But now I use Ancestry a lot, and I often add photos of paintings of people found online without giving credit. If I include an article from Wikipedia or Geni on some ancestor’s page, I usually give credit by pasting in the link, but sometimes I forget.

I knew a novelist, the late John Gardner, who had a photographic memory and could quote an entire page of some book he read once at will. He got into big trouble in his biography of Chaucer for plagiarizing sentences here and there. However, I believe he had read those sources. They entered his mind, and he didn’t realize he was using what someone else wrote.

Then there is Martin Luther King, who, when he was in divinity school, didn’t feel he had time to research and write his own papers for class, so he went to the library archives, found papers written by other students decades before, and turned some in as his own work. I guess that’s how some people get to be a Reverend Doctor.

Have you ever forwarded some meme on Facebook? Do you know who created the meme? Do you know who took the photo behind that meme that had nothing at all to do with the meme? If you shared it, that’s double plagiarism.

It’s important to give attribution where attribution is due.

I almost never forward Memes on FB unless the attribution is embedded. I was a wedding photographer for a few years and take copyright very seriously, it was the basis of my livelihood.