The ability to copy is a basic attribute of life. As actions, copying and repeating are similar in nature. Copying is to reproduce a thing in space and as such the action is spatial. Repeating, on the other hand, is to reproduce an event in time and hence it is temporal. And both are quintessential to everything we can think of. In fact, life would not have been possible, if its fundamental building block, the cell, was not able to copy itself practically endlessly and thus cause living beings to become and grow. Philosophy apart, copying a piece of writing or of a work of art was in the remote past a highly prized occupation. People who could do the job efficiently were in high demand in society.
Actually, in ancient times a copyist was more valued than the original author or artist whose work was copied. And there was also no bar to copying until the first copyright law, the Statute of Anne, was enacted in 1710 in England. In those days, even a playwright as great as William Shakespeare or the great Florentine painter Leonardo da Vinci was known to have copied freely from contemporary or earlier works.
Before the printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century (1440), copying by hand was the only means to reproduce an original piece of writing or of an artwork. However, a printed text is not an exact copy or facsimile of the original written text. James Watt, the inventor of steam engine, was the manufacturer of the first mechanical copier, the copying press, in 1780. Then came carbon paper, typewriter, blueprint, lithography and cyclostyle, all in the 19th century. Perhaps, the most important of them was typewriter and carbon paper, which took copying to a new height. Modern dry copying started in the mid-1950s with Chester Carlson's Xeroxgraphic process with his first successfully marketed Xerox 914 machine. As a result of mechanisation of copying, human copiers have lost all their past glory. More than this, modern-day strict copyright laws have made any copying of a piece of writing or artistic work without the permission of its author/creator a punishable offence.
The advent of digital copying has made copying cheap as well as pervasive. The internet, by reducing the distance between the source of an object (of course, a two-dimensional object in the cyberspace) to be copied and the agent (a person or a robot) copying it just a click away, has turned the job into child's play.
The copyright law as a result is also facing its greatest challenge now. Small wonder that audios, videos and different types of printed matter in digital format are being copied, that is, pirated as well as plagiarised, with abandon. Reproducing any text, audio, video etc in violation of copyright or patent law and then using and sharing it is piracy. But plagiarism is appropriation of others' copyrighted creative work or idea by copying in digital or other formats without acknowledging it or giving credit to the original author.
The recent incident of three Dhaka University teachers' demotion on charge of plagiarism is a case in point. Two of those so punished are learnt to have plagiarised a portion of the text from the work of a leading 20th century philosopher, Michel Foucault, by way of publishing it in a journal in their own name. Their act was too imprudent and reckless to go unnoticed. And as such it is not surprising that they got their comeuppance.
Otherwise tracking and punishing such acts of piracy or plagiarism nowadays are like chasing the proverbial wild goose, thanks to the hackers.
In truth, they (hackers) have turned the internet into a thriving marketplace for plagiarism and piracy.
No wonder, the line between the original and the fake is getting blurred by the day.