In the NPR “What Is Original?” podcast, both the guest (Mark Ronson) and the host cite (in unison) a saying in the music industry, “good artists borrow and great artists steal.” Mark Ronson states whether intentional or not, one is subconsciously influenced. Ronson states in his TED Talk, “We live in a post-sampling era. We take things we love and build on them.” Clearly, borrowing is an accepted thing to do in the music industry. It is almost a sort of primary discourse for making a majority of songs or beats. This does not mean downright stealing, despite earlier quotes. Ronson, when talking about young producers who constantly sample from YouTube, states that credit needs to go to who created it. Crediting a sample in music is similar to citing a source in academia. However, the borrowing principle in music (and its frequency) is not the same within a university setting.
Plagiarism is a major offense, punishable with expulsion. Borrowing (which would fall under plagiarism in most university cases) someone else’s academic work in the same way music borrows would probably violate most academic terms of service, and surely result in some kind of repercussion. Artists can reference or paraphrase without crediting. Take Miley Cyrus’ We Can’t Stop as a prime example. It does not cite where the “la-da-da-di, we like to party” comes from, even though it clearly came from Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh’s La Di Da Di. On the other hand, this quote from UIUC’s Student Code shows the difference with referencing, “Prompt acknowledgment is required when material from another source is paraphrased or summarized in whole or in part. This is true even if the student’s words differ substantially from those of the source.” It is hard to say that the university could gain any benefit from loosening their rules, since academia is far different from music. It is, however, easier to notice downsides of looser plagiarism rules. Students, and probably staff, would just steal work and claim it as their own. But as the title of the podcast asks, what is original? I will end with this quote from the NPR podcast, “As far as we know, the Big Bang is original, and everything else after that is…derivative.”
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