We will now consider a few points of Malcolm Gladwell's essay, Something Borrowed. Through his title, Gladwell suggests that plagiarism has a considerable cultural component, much like marriage ceremonies have. What aspects about plagiarism are cultural, in that they could be changed for the better? Is it that we punish perpetrators so harshly, or that we focus so intently upon the wrong kinds of things, or something else?

Gladwell seems to believe that in the case of Frozen, a play wherein he was plagiarized, we have had much fuss and punishment about nothing. People hammered the author unjustly. Gladwell writes about a few a well known musical examples that we can use to explain why.

In the “Choir” case, the Beastie Boys’ copying didn’t amount to theft because it was too trivial. In the “Phantom” case, what Lloyd Webber was alleged to have copied didn’t amount to theft because the material in question wasn’t original to his accuser. Under copyright law, what matters is not that you copied someone else’s work. What matters is what you copied, and how much you copied.

Whatever black letter law, we should not be sure that what really matters is what you copied, and how much. After all, maybe copyright law can be changed for the better. While the Choir Case precludes attributing any value to the thing copied due to difficulty (too trivial), we should not worry about length either. Although the phrase in question is just three notes, much longer ideas have been borrowed in music. Beethoven lifts themes almost whole cloth from Mozart for example. No one complains. Even a long luxuriously lyric Mozart Andante theme still isn't worth much because music is what you make of it: themes need to be developed. That is the composer's signature, and what matters. If the development section of a piece in the golden era of Viennese classicism were duplicated, then that would have been scandalous. The Beastie boys took that tiny little choir mordant, developed it, and in doing so made it theirs.

Writers are often ruined if they borrow sentences. Should we focus on sentences? If we equate them with a musical theme or idea, then apparently no. An idea or sentence doesn't matter very much in music or art: it's what we do with it that counts in that context. However, if we use an idea in academia, we use it in a context where even a sentence can have significance. Consider the following two:

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable, and independent of their will, relations of the production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

Who wrote that? While we may zoom in too tight on the wrong kind of thing in art, we do so for the right reasons. We're concerned about value, and that's not cultural.