Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a crime.  It is the stealing of someone else's words and making them your own.  The reason this is wrong is because if it were legal, then we would have a society that used the words nothing but the words of other people in their speeches and papers.  The concept of originality and creativity would be almost non-existent.  I'll be honest here, if plagiarism were allowed, I probably wouldn't write half of my papers.  I would do a lot of copy and pasting.  Because this is a crime, it causes people to expand their thinking skills and rephrase citations in ways to make them their own.