Question 29
The world is shrinking rapidly with the advent of faster communication, transportation, and financial flows. Products developed in one countryGucci purses, Sony electronics, McDonalds hamburgers, Japanese sushi, German BMWshave found enthusiastic acceptance in other countries. It would not be surprising to hear about a German businessman wearing an Italian suit meeting an English friend at a Japanese restaurant who later returns home to drink Russian vodka and watch Dancing with the Stars on TV. International trade has boomed over the past three decades. Since 1990, the number of multinational corporations in the world has grown from 30,000 to more than 63,000. Some of these multinationals are true giants. In fact, of the largest 150 economies in the world, only 81 are countries. The remaining 69 are multinational corporations. Walmart, the worlds largest company, has annual revenues greater than the GDP of all but the worlds 21 largest countries. Between 2000 and 2008, total world trade grew more than 7 percent per year, easily out-stripping GDP output, which was about 3 percent. Despite a dip in world trade caused by the recent worldwide recession, the world trade of products and services last year was valued at more than $12 trillion, about 17 percent of GDP worldwide. Many U.S. companies have long been successful at international marketing: McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, GE, IBM, Colgate, Caterpillar, Boeing, and dozens of other American firms have made the world their market. In the United States, names such as Sony, Toyota, Nestl, IKEA, Canon, and Nokia have become household words. Other products and services that appear to be American are, in fact, produced or owned by foreign companies.
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Question 30
We know that Shakespeare took whole chunks of Plutarch word for word to use in his Roman plays though, of course, in doing so he turned them into great poetry. Does this make Shakespeare a plagiarist? Was he a word thief?In its legal definition, plagiarism includes “both the theft or misrepresentation of intellectual property and the substantial textual copying of another’s work”. But it is also considered to be a factor of a particular culture or time that is, in some cultures and in some periods the idea was undefined which makes it harder to identify precisely. However, the main problem these days is plagiarism in academic writing, which is becoming increasingly common, due to the vast amount of material that has been published which can be accessed via the Internet. This easy access, coupled with the increasing pressure put on students, has led to a rapid rise in incidents of plagiarism. It comes down to who owns the intellectual property in question, and with the advent of the Internet this has become less clearly defined.
