Opinion Post: Plagiarist, I’ve Got My Eyes on You.

Before now it had been piracy, dubbing people’s hard work into cheap disks, selling them in the black market and putting their effort in the pocket naming ourselves hustlers and seeing nothing wrong with that, despite it clearly written in the original work that “no part of this work may be reproduced by any means without the permission of the owner”.

It was the norm, it still is.

Now there is another trend that if not nipped in the bud would spell doom for the literary society and it is plagiarism; reproducing the work of a writer without giving him/her credit. And it is more common on the Nigerian Facebook space than on paper (unless someone somewhere is compiling all your creative posts and planning to publish them in his name).

It tells on the part of a plagiarist that they are thieves with low chaff for brains and a void for conscience if everything on their walls are other people’s creative post that they have edited and slotted in their names in-between where the original author might have put theirs, and it may look trivial until we stop seeing Nigerian books and all we get to read are foreigners telling of foreign places because no one can talk of home when five different authors have the same sort of book that one is obviously the product of another without anyone giving anybody credit.

Plagiarism is a criminal act and should not be laughed off as nothing.

If you are planning to make a post on a blog or any social media outlet and it has been used by another author in the past, you owe it to them to mention their name either immediately after the line or you give them their due credit at the end of the write-up.

Why don’t people do this? Clearly many deceive themselves into thinking that it diminishes their value as people will term them less creative for using someone else’s sentences or phrases but it doesn’t, because if nothing else it shows a wide reading scope and honesty. Again there are people who try to be what they are not, they portray themselves as witty writers when they are shitty writers and some claim to be funny when they can’t even see a mile long joke hidden with satirical brilliance or worse they call themselves poets when poetry to them is ‘roses are red, violets are blue, I love bread, you know this is true’.

Don’t say after all it is just Facebook or Twitter or whatever and that it is not so serious, someone went to great length to create that joke or poem or story that is being stolen and you owe it to them to give them their due credit.

Written By Obinna Omotayo Jones who tweets with the handle @jonesobinna and uses the username Obinna Omotayo Jones On Facebook.