Plagiarism

Plagiarism is to copy someones work and then claim it as your own. This has happened many times including several famous cases with the examples of the patent for the telephone an the British Governments evidence for going to war in Iraq.

Is it always wrong to claim someone else's work as your own? In the vast majority of cases I would have to say yes, as it is an act of deceit but I can also see scenarios where pretending to have done something that was in fact done by another could be of great advantage to a large number of people therefore lessening the overall immorality. A prime example of this would be the patenting of the telephone where two inventors submitted designs, neither of which would work on their own but if components were combined from the two the invention was possible. Mr Bell paid the patent people to manipulate his plans and thus the telephone was born. If he had not done this then life would be very different today as it would have taken much longer for this technology to appear.