Plagiarism playing by the rules: in the academic world, in music and even in church, what constitutes plagiarism is under new scrutiny after journalism's wake-up call.

Anyone who thinks that a young black reporter wrote the book on plagiarism does not know much history. Other writers, performers and artists--even well-known preachers--who blend of the arts of writing, storytelling and dramatic performance, have faced accusations of plagiarism.

In essence, plagiarism is borrowing someone else's words and passing them off as one's own, whether in print, speech or performance. Journalists, scholars and other professional writers understand the rules, written and unwritten. Any original work should be just that. A writer can't change a few words and phrases in another's work or rearrange their order and use them without giving credit or citing the original works, ideas or facts as a source.

On nearly every college campus, professors include warnings to students about the use of computer generated term papers and online libraries to complete writing assignments and research papers.

For example, a study conducted by the Center for Academic Integrity found that almost 80 percent of college students admit to cheating at least once. Another survey, this one a national study published in Education Week, found that 54 percent of students admitted to plagiarizing from the Internet; 74 percent admitted that at least once during the past school year they had engaged in "serious" cheating; and 47 percent believe their teachers sometimes choose to ignore students who are cheating.

In the wake of the recent scandals at newspapers and other publications, some academics are taking a look at whether students understand what constitutes academic plagiarism, especially in journalism and mass communication classes. Dean David M. Rubin of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University says he has altered the curriculum to include material on the most recent incidents, including the New York Times multipage explanation of how Jayson Blair, a young reporter, came to plagiarize or fabricate numerous stories.

"Our hope is to let the students learn about it and learn from it as a way of warning them what not to do," he says.

Harry Amana, who teaches journalism at North Carolina A&T State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says his course syllabus includes repeated references to plagiarism so that students can't plead ignorance about what is and what is not acceptable. At both of those universities, he says, there are written guidelines in the student handbooks and on campus Web sites. In the example at the University of North Carolina, "plagiarism is a serious violation of the Honor Code. Because it is a form of academic cheating, students found guilty of plagiarism usually receive the normal sanction of suspension for one semester and a grade of 'F' in the course."

What constitutes plagiarism, or lifting other's writing, may be confused in some students' minds today because of the ease of copying and pasting from the Internet, especially in a generation used to "sampling" or downloading music that belongs to others under copyright.

Christina Morgan, who recently graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio, says she was aware of classmates who cheated in school and got away with it.

"It wasn't a big deal to them," she says. "They knew how to do it in such a way as to not draw attention to themselves. Often, the professors don't have a clue because they don't really understand what's out there (on the Web)."

Alarmed by such brazen behavior, some professors and colleges are trying to fight back. Their need for stronger detection tools is spawning a new industry of cheat catchers, as educators pay private, proprietary firms for help. Ironically, an Internet search on Google, where many of the academic plagiarists begin their searches, discovered Turnitin.com, an online service that assists high-school teachers and college-level instructors learn how to detect and prevent students who use the Internet to falsify written assignments.

Accusations of plagiarism in academic writing, fiction and sermons have plagued prominent African American figures. Consider, for example, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alex Haley, whose 1976 novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, captured the imagination of Americans--black and white--unlike any other slavery story before it. This fictionalized account traced the author's heritage back to a specific village in Africa. Roots was hailed upon its publication, coinciding with the nation's yearlong bicentennial celebration, as an historical document.

Owing to the tremendous and enduring popularity of Roots, many people mistakenly still refer to Haley as an academic or historian. He was neither. In fact, Haley was accused of lifting some descriptions and scenes in Roots from other published works, including Margaret Walker's novel Jubilee and Harold Courlander's novel The African. A lawsuit by Walker against Haley alleging plagiarism was dismissed in court, but Haley confessed that "various materials from The African found their way into Roots" and later agreed to pay Courlander a $650,000 settlement.

Subsequently historians have widely discredited the authenticity of Haley's genealogical and historical facts. Nevertheless, Roots remains on Doubleday's backlist and continues to be an important read among those seeking insights into the black experience all the way back to its African roots.

Similarly, allegations of plagiarism have done little to nothing to dim the brilliant light of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy. Few people know--and many of those who do, don't care--that charges of academic fraud and sermon stealing have long dogged the great civil rights leader.

Credible assertions that King plagiarized parts of his doctoral dissertation and other academic works burst into public view in the late 1980s. Scholars discovered similarities to others words and writings as they poured over King's papers, which had been donated by his widow to the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, for compilation into a 14-volume edition of his correspondence, sermons, public statements, published writings and unpublished manuscripts.

Clayborne Carson, the Stanford history professor and civil rights activist invited by Coretta Scott King to edit the papers, said in an article "Editing Martin Lnther King, Jr.: Political and Scholarly Issues," Carson pointed out that a London Telegraph columnist stated "the King Project had discovered that King's dissertation was based on a thesis submitted earlier by another Boston University student, Jack Boozer."

Carson tried mightily to downplay the repeated examples of King's use of other's words and writings as his own. "Even as we became more and more aware of the extent to which King relied upon the words of others, we also came to the somewhat paradoxical conclusion that King's academic writings--and certainly his later writings and speeches as a public figure--were reliable expressions of his public persona," Carson wrote. "Writings that were flawed by plagiaries were nevertheless revealing in that they expressed views that were consistent internally and over time."

In other words, King lifted other people's words to make his own views clear. Carson and other scholars argue that King's skilled use of language--even if stolen from others--served him well as a weapon against the racism of his day. Carson admitted that argument didn't wash with some scholars, though.

"King and other black leaders have long recognized that the democratic rhetoric they appropriate from white political leaders originally signified a racial reality African-Americans found unacceptable," Carson wrote. "The black leaders' achievement was in using the political vocabulary of the dominant culture creatively and ironically in order to change that reality. For King and other African-Americans, the appropriation of ... texts was a political act because they asserted their ability to use those texts for their own purposes, as a critique of present reality. Or as a prescription for a future one."

So does this mean that African-Americans have a different standard for plagiarism than whites? Perhaps. Or maybe it's just in the communal quality of black life that African-Americans "share" some creative ideas and concepts.

Listen to the Reverend Archibald Carey, a black preacher from Chicago, Illinois, and an advisor to King, as he addressed the 1952 Republican National Convention:

   We, Negro Americans, sing with all loyal
   Americans:
   My country 'tis of thee,
   Sweet land of liberty ...
   That's exactly what we mean--
   From every mountainside, let freedom ring
   Not only from the Green Mountains and
   White Mountains of Vermont and New
   Hampshire;
   Not only from the Catskills of New York;
   But from the Ozarks in Arkansas,
   From the Stone Mountain in Georgia,
   From the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia
   Let freedom ring not only for the minorities
   of the United States,
   but for the disinherited of all the earth
   --may the Republican Party, under God,
   from every mountainside,
   Let freedom ring!

To be sure, black preachers have a long tradition of listening to one another and "borrowing" phrases, gestures and other congregation-pleasing rhetorical tricks without giving credit. And nobody, including the ripped-off ministers, dares think of it as plagiarism. So, too, with black entertainers. Rap and house music are derivative arts, featuring heavily sampled tracks from other artists and sometimes mixing various media and recorded spoken words to create new messages for audiences that are often unfamiliar with the original works.

Where King and other black ministers might be forgiven in the name of social uplift for their appropriations, no such excuse flows to commercial artists. Some black artists have gone too far and been challenged for it.

In 1988, syndicated newspaper humor columnist Art Buchwald and a business partner, movie producer Alain Bernheim, sued Paramount Pictures, arguing the Hollywood studio stole their idea and allowed Eddie Murphy to make it into the hit movie, Coming to America, it took them four years, but they proved the Buchwald manuscript was the original idea behind the movie and that the studio had not given them credit--or compensation.

After winning their case in court, Buchwald and Bernheim allowed their fight against Paramount to become the basis of a 1992 book Fatal Subtraction, written by Pierce O'Donnell, a Los Angeles lawyer, with Dennis McDougal, a Los Angeles Times reporter. The book portrays Murphy, who was given writing credit for the movie, as a "talented human being ... reduced to a commodity."

That's a familiar refrain. Only this time the black entertainer reduced to said commodity got paid. History is chock full of anecdotes about black artists whose talents were exploited and never compensated.

--Sam Fulwood III is a columnist at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio.