If an artist is clearly a master of his or her craft (e.g. Dylan, Picasso), I don't mind plagiarism so much. However, I found this passage wrong-headed: > “Ac

If an artist is clearly a master of his or her craft (e.g. Dylan, Picasso), I don't mind plagiarism so much. However, I found this passage wrong-headed: > “Academic plagiarism norms”, Frye writes, “are primarily an inefficient and illegitimate form of extra-legal academic rent-seeking that should be ignored.” And although he doesn’t quite call those who disagree with him “wussies and pussies”, he does disparagingly refer to the “plagiarism police”, which includes anyone who tries to identify academic plagiarism and somehow punish the plagiarist. I completely disagree. I am a non-academic who takes published academic work seriously. My number one discovery mechanism for new knowledge is not arbitrary web searches or the even a library catalogue, but citations. A strong norm against plagiarism in academia (where everyone really is standing on the shoulders of giants) is essential for academic knowledge to be available among the public, not to be cloistered away, only available to a learned elite. Academic research already presents so many accessibility barriers to the public (stiff & boring writing, copious jargon/symbols, excessive abstraction, lack of data for reproducibility, false published conclusions and even publisher paywalls to name a few), I'd hate to see academia create another by normalizing plagiarism.