There are two kinds of plagiarism, a good kind, and a bad. The latter is the one the teachers in school always warned you about. This is the secret plagiarism, the dishonest plagiarism, when you take someone else's complete work and pass it off as your own, copying something and only changing the name. The first kind of plagiarism, the good kind, is simply the free and open re-use of ideas and cultural expression. Before technology made it possible to reproduce mass quantities of an art work (printing presses, photocopiers, tape recorders, and most recently digital samplers and scanners), creativity was a one-time thing. Stories and songs were passed by word of mouth and changed at will by each generation of performers. Artists incorporated each others ideas into their own original works. In these times the artists inspiration, as today, was her environment and experiences. Looking at the world around her, she would respond to it with a creative work.
Now is the same as then, except for two things. First, as mentioned above, the technology of reproduction. As soon as ideas could be stored, copied, reproduced, put into tangible, physical form, some people of course wanted to be able to own them. Of course, because when something can be owned, it can be sold, bought -money can be made. But art and ideas cannot be owned, only the means of reproducing them can. Some refuse to see this, preferring to act as parasites on art. Their motivation is money, not art, not ideas. Hence the idea of copyright, which, not surprisingly, is just about as old as the idea of real estate.
The second modern difference is that our environment, our experiences, consist of a much greater amount of man made events- mass media. In addition to trees, the ocean, a sunset, we now have TV, movies, radio, newspapers, billboards, and countless other manufactured sensory inputs. What percentage of your daily information intake is from nature, and what percentage is man-made, an electronic message that thousands of others across the land are also receiving? The last time you learned something, was it from examining a natural phenomenon yourself, like a thunderstorm? Or was it from a book, or the evening news on television?
If you think about this for a moment you will realize that in modern times artists, as with everyone else, are immersed in a sea of information- this is their environment, their public domain. Therefore, why shouldn't anything in this environment be fair game for one's palette, grist for the creative mill? Or should the majority of our experiences be cut off from use, because someone says they are owned by others? Are our memories themselves copyrighted and registered trademarks?
Of course not. Ideas belong to everyone. Information is free, and you can do whatever you want with it. You can try to make money with a piece of it, of course, but should you be able to prevent someone else from doing so, or making a comment on it and the issues it involves? We here at Synergy don't believe so, and thus we believe today's copyright laws are grossly unfair. So please, unless you plan to steal someone's entire work and call it your own, ignore copyright laws. Appropriate and steal bits of culture for your own use in the creative expressions you want to make. Don't let the lawyers and accountants push you around.