The plague of plagiarism has again struck the United Kingdom poetry communities with the revelations of British poet David Morgan plagiarizing a variety of poems by mostly American poets.
In both instances, the plagiarists copied verbatim – with a few minor changes – poems previously published. I want distinguish mashing up from plagiarism. A culture mashup, like sampling, takes pieces from an extant work and reworks it with new material in the hopes of creating something new.
Plagiarism is attempting to get something for nothing.