Plagiarism Plague

the article for this post is "the rules of attribution" by deborah r. gerhardt. the article talks about how plagierism "plagues" many highschool and college students because they are only given the rules one time. the author compares this to basketball. in basketball, players are not given the rules once and then thrown into the game. instead, they actually learn the rules solidly before main game play. basically, the author is saying that today's young academians are ill prepared for writing in the harsh, cruel academic world.

i always thought that some of the copyright laws made no sense at all. anyway, i don't know if college students are ill prepared. i think a lot of students are lazy and know that they are copying. citing works has been drilled into my head over and over again. what has me confused is when to simply put the work cited in the works cited and when you have to put a quotation in the paper itself. the article also mentioned about professors typing phrases into a search engines and various "plagiarism detecting" programs. i question the reliability of such programs. i like to use as little research as possible. why so? this is due to part lasiness (i have to be honest) and i like to keep my ideas informed, but as much my own as possible. so if i come up with something on my own, it happens to be similiar to something someone else wrote, and my professor looks on the internet for plagiarism, will i get punished for plagiarism? just like with composing music, i can't be informed of all the works of art that are floating around in the academic world. there's truly nothing new under the sun...