[mjw1007]

Maybe I'm being small-minded, but I strongly dislike using the word 'plagiarism' to refer to cheating on your homework by copying someone else.

To me, plagiarism is taking credit for someone else's ideas at their expense; it's a "sin" against the person being copied.

Copying someone else with their connivance, or paying some essay-mill writer to do your work for you, should be in the same category as taking a calculator into a mental-arithmetic test, not the same category as « My name in Dnepropetrovsk is cursed, when he finds out I publish first ».

[ambulancechaser]

> plagiarism is taking credit for someone else's ideas at their expense;

that seems like an unworkable definition. If I submit John Milton's Paradise Lost as my own work on an application to grad school, it certainly wouldn't be an "expense" to the long dead author.

Plagiarism is a fraud where you misrepresent the work of others as your own. In the academic world, what else is there but your own work?

[mjw1007]

If I discovered a lost work of Milton and pretended it was my own, then that would be acting at the expense of Milton's reputation, in the sense I mean. So I don't think it matters if the "someone else" happens to be dead.

(If I tried it with Paradise Lost there'd be no expense to their reputation, but that just means it's not a realistic example of someone attempting plagiarism.)

[thaumasiotes]

> In the academic world, what else is there but your own work?

Work published under your name but performed by anonymous flunkies. It's... the norm in the academic world, actually.