Does The Internet Generation Even Know What Plagiarism Means?

A politician’s researchers land her in hot water by copying other people’s work

Rachel Reeves, a senior British MP, has just published The Women Who Made Modern Economics.

No-one seriously believes a busy politician has time to write a heavyweight book herself. The fly in the ointment here, as revealed by The Financial Times,* is that in places her researchers copied word for word from other books or websites.

This is not one careless mistake made by a single overworked and underpaid researcher. It is symptomatic of a generation brought up to believe that whatever is printed somewhere on the Internet is free information that can be copied, pasted and re-used with impunity. People who would never dream of not paying a tradesman for work done in their house do not view re-using other people’s words as stealing.

Plagiarism is out of control, and it is too late to put the genie back in the bottle.

• The Financial Times, 25 October 2023