It is often said that mimicry is flattery. I don’t tend to disagree with this statement, but plagiarism is a different thing all together. Most people think that it’s alright to remove plagiarism, but lets look into that. Plagiarism is the act of unjustly stealing someone’s written work, whether it’s homework, a speech or a song. Generally, plagiarism is taken very serious, even in open free speech democracies. Often a person caught or even accused of plagiarism is subject to embarrassed. It is something much more common than you’d think, many top artists as well from the Beatles to Led Zeppelin have even been accused of plagiarism in recent history. Whether or not they realized they were plagiarizing is up for debate, but sometimes people can accidentally plagiarize an artists that they’re heavily influenced by.
In places such as China where you have open-plagiarism it can rob the incentive people to create invention and to compete in the market place, since companies with more capital can just steal their ideas and produce on a more grand scale without paying the creator or inventor a cent. Western societies such as the United States and European nations generally try to remove plagiarism. There are many legal methods to which ideas can be reserved as intellectual property and plagiarism can be prosecuted. In schools you’re often taught not to plagiarism and students are punished for it.
In my personal opinion, plagiarism is not always quite a bad thing. The abundance of say similar items in a market place can reduce the cost of those items. If you have 5 companies making the same product instead of say just one company due to the fact that said company has a monopoly on the intellectual property rights of the design it’s selling. Medicine can often time run into this problem as well, where simple medicines are often patented to avoid plagiarism, but having one company produce the medicine often means they can set the prices as high or as low as they would actually like to. As to all things in life there the good and bad aspects to it and as they say mimicry is flattery, but perhaps it’s best not to mimic too much.