In the digital age, should plagiarism matter in academic paper and research publication?

In law school, plagiarism was a big deal – and an easy trap to fall into, as writing a clear explanation of the legal background of a particular issue or court case is best done by copying and pasting it, and then working out a paraphrasing of it. We were often warned, though, that we needed to be sure that we kept track and weren’t forgetting to reword anything.

As a practicing attorney, it still mattered a little – but not nearly as much. We are constantly told not to “reinvent the wheel” when writing memoranda for a client or for other attorneys. Therefore, background is often lifted nearly word for word from previous memos, or from treatises.

Internet blog and news resources provide us an infinite (practically) amount of written information we can either use as our basis for background writing – or, we can do like we do here and link out to information that’s the best summarization. Wikipedia, as it is subject to more and better review, may be a way to do this as well.

As we are seeing more and more “digital natives” entering college, and producing research product, should we be concerned any longer with plagiarism in the sense of the “don’t copy and paste” model? As long as the text is attributed to the original source, shouldn’t we be teaching our students practices that have been essential in the professional world and are more and more important as we work in a 24-hour constant updated news cycle environment? Should we be looking at our copyright laws when it comes to print sources with this in mind?

Essentially, why shouldn’t we copy and paste, if there’s a reason not to?