"Why can't we use other people work to create our own. If someone took my thesis and turned it in and got an A, I would be psyched for them and happy they used my work. It doesn't hurt me at all."
Not sure if this is devils advocate, but i'll answer.
If someone copies one paper, theres a legitimate argument that maybe it doesn't matter. But if copying in university was rife, people would just copy each others work and not learn anything, going through school for the monetary benefit only. Now lets say the subject is History, perhaps you don't care either way (short-sighted opinion, but the benefits are difficult to quantify). But now lets say this is medicine. All doctors cheat on their exams and research papers, so no-one knows anything, and even those who do bother to learn find it difficult to advance medical knowledge much further than the architects of all the original work.
So now does this attitude hurt you? Probably.
Games are far less important in life than professions like medicine. But Zynga must be one of the richest games companies around right now, and I'm not sure they actually know how to design their own games. Certainly i've never seen an original piece of work from them, everything is a rip off of smaller developers works, heavily marketed to eclipse the original creators. Who knows what this is doing to the facebook games market in the long term? (of course, the world might be a better place without so much facebook, but thats another story)
Not sure if this is devils advocate, but i'll answer.
If someone copies one paper, theres a legitimate argument that maybe it doesn't matter. But if copying in university was rife, people would just copy each others work and not learn anything, going through school for the monetary benefit only. Now lets say the subject is History, perhaps you don't care either way (short-sighted opinion, but the benefits are difficult to quantify). But now lets say this is medicine. All doctors cheat on their exams and research papers, so no-one knows anything, and even those who do bother to learn find it difficult to advance medical knowledge much further than the architects of all the original work.
So now does this attitude hurt you? Probably.
Games are far less important in life than professions like medicine. But Zynga must be one of the richest games companies around right now, and I'm not sure they actually know how to design their own games. Certainly i've never seen an original piece of work from them, everything is a rip off of smaller developers works, heavily marketed to eclipse the original creators. Who knows what this is doing to the facebook games market in the long term? (of course, the world might be a better place without so much facebook, but thats another story)