Plagiarism is so yesterday, according to this story in the New York Times.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

This is the mundane side of the copyright debate, that all written work should be freely available to all to foster creativity.  How stealing content from someone, or even just somewhere, else fosters creativity eludes me.  But then, I’m a dinosaur and don’t understand the new wave.

The notion that there might be a new model young person, who freely borrows from the vortex of information to mash up a new creative work, fueled a brief brouhaha earlier this year with Helene Hegemann, a German teenager whose best-selling novel about Berlin club life turned out to include passages lifted from others.

Instead of offering an abject apology, Ms. Hegemann insisted, “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.” A few critics rose to her defense, and the book remained a finalist for a fiction prize (but did not win).

There was once a time when taking more than a few words from someone else’s pen (that’s a thing that people used to write with, putting ink to paper), was considered a grievous intellectual offense.  It wasn’t that anyone owned ideas, but the expression of those ideas belonged to whoever came up with it.  When an author or scholar used the words of another without attribution, they would be shunned in disgrace.  Now, they enter contests.

That theory does not wash with Sarah Wilensky, a senior at Indiana University, who said that relaxing plagiarism standards “does not foster creativity, it fosters laziness.”

“You’re not coming up with new ideas if you’re grabbing and mixing and matching,” said Ms. Wilensky, who took aim at Ms. Hegemann in a column in her student newspaper headlined “Generation Plagiarism.”

Uh oh.  Wilensky said something mean about the Slackoisie.  She’s in big trouble now.  Or perhaps she’s recognizing what so many others deny, that the internet distinguishes the Millennials in ways that can’t be ignored.  Their relationships are virtual, the opinions of barely pubescent children can be published worldwide on par with Nobel Laureates, and their education is informed by instantaneous access to the words crafted by a billion minds, ranging from the brilliant to the banal.  No, this is not your father’s internet.

Certainly it’s lazy to just lift some language from some amorphous website to fluff and puff one’s own work.  I mean, it’s all there, laid out for us, just ripe for the picking.  If it’s not under lock and key, it’s free for the taking.  And why not, as Ms. Hegemann asserts.  It’s not like there’s anything original.  Us old guys used up all the original ideas and words, right?

But there’s another possibility as well.  Writing is hard work.  Writing well is even harder.  I hear from people all the time telling me that I must spend all day writing my blawg posts, because that’s what it would take them.  As if their inadequacy somehow controls my effort.   Don’t blame me that you can’t write well or quickly.  I’m only responsible for me, not you.

Writing is hard.  Thinking is harder still.  Even typing out the words requires practice and effort.  Cutting and pasting, not so much.  In one of my favorite quotes, Sir Joshua Reynolds wrote, “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.”  To put together words to express an idea is really the manifestation of thought.

While there are some people who show great capacity for writing, it’s worthless in the absence of meaningful ideas.  Consider this website if you doubt me, where strings of meaningless words are crafted to substitute for anything remotely resembling cognizable ideas.

For some, this is considered the height of creativity.  Unless this is outed as sheer and utter nonsense, we may be looking at the death of thought during our children’s lifetime.  Ms. Wilensky calls this “laziness.”  Even this description may be too kind.  The belief that its acceptable to take the words, and hence the thoughts, of others as their own isn’t merely a shortcut to new-fangled originality, but the surest route to intellectual atrophy.