Talking about plagiarism here is a complete red herring. Plagiarism is essentially a form of fraud: you are taking work that someone else did and presenting it

Talking about plagiarism here is a complete red herring. Plagiarism is essentially a form of fraud: you are taking work that someone else did and presenting it as your own. You can plagiarize work that is in the public domain, you can even plagiarize your own work that you own the copyright to. Avoiding a charge of plagiarism is easy: just explicitly quote the work and attribute to the proper author (possibly yourself). You can copy the entirety of the works of Disney, as long as you are attributing them properly, you are not guilty of plagiarism. The Pirate Bay has never been accused of plagiarism. And plagiarism is not a problem that corporations care about, except insofar as they may pay a plagiarist more money than they deserve.' The thing that really matters is copyright infringement. Copyright infringement doesn't care about attribution - my example above with the entire works of Disney, while not plagiarism, is very much copyright infringement, and would cost dearly. Both Aaron Swartz and The Pirate Bay have been accused and prosecuted for copyright infringement, not plagiarism.