Sloppy language plagues the conversation about copies and copying. Many very different terms are used almost interchangeably. Even experts on related issues can be guilty of sloppy verbiage. Tad Crawford, despite being an attorney, the publisher at Allworth Press, and the author of legal guides for designers, starts his article, “What Steps to Take When Your Work Is Plagiarized,” with the statement: “The copyright law forbids the plagiarism of creative work.” ¹ Wrong. The copyright law does not forbid plagiarism. Certain instances of plagiarism may be illegal, but plagiarism itself is not.

I’m not going to deal with the interlocking legal issues of copyright, patent, trademark, trade dress, and business practice law. That’s another article. I hope that graphic designers care about the issue of copying beyond legal standards. But to have any conversation we need to start out using language more precisely.

Plagiarism is the passing off of someone else’s creation as one’s own. The act of copying (legal or illegal) is not plagiarism. The plagiarism is in making someone believe (or letting someone believe) a lie about authorship. If you put your name on a Shakespeare sonnet, then that is plagiarism, but it would not be illegal. Since Shakespeare’s work is in the public domain, there is no copyright issue involved. On the other hand, if you photocopy this article, include all publication information, and credit it to me but fail to get permission, you have probably infringed on my copyright but you have not committed plagiarism. It’s also worth noting that standards of plagiarism are not universal.

Since plagiarism is an ethical issue rather than a legal one, the standard of what is plagiarism can vary from situation to situation. An academic institution is likely to be among the most stringent about what constitutes plagiarism (although not always the most insistent on the production of fully original contributions). Since one of the core purposes of universities is the production and preservation of knowledge, anything that muddies the record runs counter to institutional goals. Careful footnoting that would not be expected in this magazine, for instance, helps preserve and build the history and understanding of ideas and is required in academic writing.

For example, Martin Luther King’s plagiarism in his doctoral thesis was serious and cannot be explained away as naiveté or as a petty attack on a great man.² The same borrowing of words without attribution would probably not have been an ethical problem in a sermon, however. The weaving of unattributed literary, social, and biblical allusions is the stuff of great clerical rhetoric.

Top left: Kieron Dwyer’s “consumer whore” logo is clearly a parody of Starbucks. Its adoption of the Starbucks logo form is essential to the point It makes.

Top right: These copies of the Tide detergent box could not be called plagiarism Since the borrowing from the original is open, but are also not parody Since they are not poking fun at the specific brand image that is being used.