Originality, Plagiarism, and the art of the Remix

This article from the New York Times:

The Free-Appropriation Writer



To what extent should writers, thinkers be responsible for creating original material? I think this discussion has implications for our field(s):

"After a blogger and fellow novelist announced that Ms. Hegemann had blended sizeable chunks of his own writing into hers, Ms. Hegemann, instead of following the plagiarism-gotcha script of contrition and retraction so familiar in recent years, announced that appropriating the passages from that book and other sources was her plan all along.

A child of a media-saturated generation, she presented herself as a writer whose birthright is the remix, the use of anything at hand she feels suits her purposes, an idea of communal creativity that certainly wasn’t shared by those from whom she borrowed. In a line that might have been stolen from Sartre (it wasn’t) she added: 'There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.'"