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Plagiarism is Illuminated

Just read "Everything is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer (Perennial 2002) and it contained this interesting passage (p. 206):

God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, "God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them." God is the original plagiarizer. With a lack of reasonable sources from which to filch -- man created in the image of what? the animals? -- the creation of man was an act of reflexive plagiarizing; God looted the mirror. When we plagiarize, we are likewise creating in the image and participating in the completion of Creation.

I posted this because one of the tenets of the "low barrier" copyright protection philosophy is that we all copy from others, that is a major part of the creative process, so the idea that God also "copied" is both amusing and instructive.

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