Ralph Luker has an interesting post at "Cliopatria" on the Martin Luther King Jr.'s plagiarism. In some (vague) ways it reminds me of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's plagiarism of Schelling in Biographia Litteraria, although in a sense King's is a bit more egregious given the context in which it occurs.
Plagiarism is a curious sort of failing, because it is difficult to define outside particular contexts. Charges of plagiarism make only very little sense in oral cultures. Which is not to say that they, or equivalents, don't exist; it's just that the spoken word requires more flexibility about matters of imitation (think of the last time you gave a joke you had heard from someone else without attributing it), and tends to bring up fewer issues with authorship. Further, a lot of what is repeated at the level of the spoken word is, for all practical purposes, common patrimony; and there are lots of cases where corporations or people have to fight quite hard to prevent even copyrighted material from becoming treated as part of that common patrimony (Kleenex, Coke, Xerox, Betty Boop, etc.).
Even when dealing with the written word, plagiarism isn't always easy to define. A lot of the written word is common legacy, too (Shakespeare, Bunyan, etc.), and to the extent authorship is important at all, people are expected to do the work of recognizing echoes, allusions, and even outright repetitions themselves. And it isn't always clear where to draw the line between what is and what is not common legacy. And literarily speaking, plagiarism is scarcely an issue at all; Coleridge's Biographia Litteraria loses not one whit of its literary excellence by the pages that are undeniable translations of Schelling. Even philosophically speaking it need not be an issue; Hume uses a few Malebranchean arguments without attributing them to Malebranche, for instance. Anyone who had reads Malebranche can easily recognize them, since they are (taking translation into account) virtually word-for-word appropriations. But Hume is not being any less brilliant or philosophically original in his use of the arguments.
Plagiarism becomes genuinely egregious in cases where one or both of two things are involved: money and academics; because in both such cases plagiarism potentially threatens the integrity of the entire system. (I suppose one can add journalism; but I'm inclined to think that the reason plagiarism becomes an issue in journalism is entirely one of money.) And here I see no real alternative to taking it very seriously indeed. Yes, mistakes can happen; but there are many cases in which we will be penalized sharply for mistakes despite their being mistakes. Such is life. I take a hard line on this (and that's perhaps significant, since I'm not much of one for taking a hard line on anything): King's doctorate should have been revoked, since part of the requirements for it failed to meet academic standards. (Or perhaps, if there were any technicalities to allow it, another work could have been substituted for his dissertation. This would be less satisfactory, but perhaps more feasible.)
