Plagiarism in three acts

Abstract

Three brief studies are conducted regarding plagiarism in the age of the internet. The first identifies the disparity between cited and un-cited examples of brief media catchphrases used on the internet. The second uses a thesaurus to generate alternative wordings of established definitions and tests them for legibility. The third asks respondents to spontaneously generate definitions for common concepts and uses Google to test those spontaneous definitions for plagiarism. In all three cases, results are such that they call into question current views on the nature of plagiarism itself.