Plagiarism, Stealing and Cheating

We had an interesting conversation yesterday about plagiarism.

I've never really thought about the definition of plagiarism and what exactly it is. We were asked whether we thought it constituted a criminal act and a few of us thought that because it amounted to stealing someone else's work, it was a criminal act.

Karin's point really made me think: if you steal my laptop, then I no longer have it, but if you steal my words, they haven't been taken away from me. Can you steal someone's intellectual property? Is intellectual property actually property?

Colin also raised an interesting point: that plagiarism can take two forms: cheating - deliberate fraudulence - and incompetence - when a student is still learning about how to quote and cite other authors and fails to acknowledge an author by accident.