Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a serious crime. People work hard to create or discover new things and it is important to give them the credit they deserve. It is immoral and illegal to steal someone else's work. I would be devastated after working so hard on something to find out that someone else took my idea as their own. It is time consuming and sometimes a pain to get the citations right but it is worth it considering the time that was put into the document you are getting the information from. The Internet definitely blurs the lines of "legally owned". Anyone can pirate songs and movies from shared download sites. I see people on facebook all the time that post quotes under their status. I'm sure those people aren't intending to plagiarize someone but they are using someone else's words. People on YouTube post videos of anything. Many times you can view the same concept of one video in many videos that were made by several people. Wikipedia is crazy. Anyone can add to the source. If I'm researching something Wikipedia is not a good source because anyone can make modifications to what is written.