On plagiarism – Regina Rini in TLS:

‘But now we come to the third problem with plagiarism: cheating. This is not the same thing as stealing. A student who buys their term paper from an essay mill has cheated, but nothing has been stolen. Indeed, cheating – not stealing or muddying – is the main issue in most cases of student plagiarism. That’s because student work usually isn’t expected to make original contributions to scholarship. Students are still learning; their writing serves mainly as a marker of their progress rather than a vehicle for novel insights. In that context, the problem with plagiarism is simply that it cheats the system.
This explains why most colleges’ plagiarism policies, like Harvard’s, are so absolutist. If the point is to catch cheaters, you want a simple standard of evidence. No fussing about intentions or fine details. If you reproduced text or ideas without attribution, that’s it: you cheated.
These three forms of plagiarism – stealing, muddying and cheating – interact in confusing ways. Gay and Oxman are most plausibly accused only of the muddying variety, yet they are judged by the absolutist standards of cheating, then publicly condemned in moralized language fit for stealing. Plagiarism is a conceptual mess – no wonder it was primed for opportunistic character assassination.’

Read the article here.

The distinction between stealing and honoring the tradition is muddy indeed.

The desire for purity will enable character and other types of assassination.

Stealing is stealing when the thief has not been talented enough, let's leave it at that.