Imitation is suicide.

Confession: I didn’t actually write those words. Well, I did, but not in the proper sense. Ralph Waldo Emerson jotted them down. I merely scanned a Web page of “imitation” themed quotations, picked out the brightest of the bunch, and typed it in.

Perhaps I should be feeling sick to my stomach, but I’m actually feeling quite pleased with the way things turned out.

It was fast. It was easy. And I couldn’t have put it better myself. Really, why bother composing when somebody out there’s already done a better job of it?

Plagiarism has emerged as the scandal spectator sport du jour, with stories of criminal copycatting threatening to elbow Cynthia Nixon’s Sapphic leanings out of the press spotlight. Once the cardinal no-no of academia, the act of copying is, well, being copied. Students and dons are playing fast and loose with their papers and books, ripping off other people’s ideas and phrases as if the Library of Congress was some all-you-can-eat Szechuan buffet.

The latest in the current crop of geek gotcha tales is a Harvard constitutional scholar, Lawrence Tribe, who acknowledged Monday that a 1985 book of his, “God Save This Honorable Court,” borrows from Henry Abraham’s “Justices and Presidents,” including a verbatim 19-word passage. Mr. Tribe happens to possess tight Democratic ties, having, for example, represented Al Gore in his lawsuit over the 2000 election results. The parallels between the books were first reported last week by the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, and Mr. Tribe’s supporters have retaliated by chalking it all up to a nasty political attack.

Over the weekend it was reported that New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell and criminal psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis are charging that English playwright Bryony Lavery, in her Tony nominated “Frozen,” lifted dialogue, characters, and structure from Dr. Lewis’s 1998 book and Mr. Gladwell’s 1997 profile of Dr. Lewis. Ms. Lavery’s newest play, “The Last Easter,” is in previews at the Lucille Lortel Theater in Greenwich Village.

Meanwhile, the author of “The Da Vinci Code,” Dan Brown, is being accused of plagiarism from a 1982 nonfiction book and a 1983 novel. Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, authors of “The Holy Blood” and “The Holy Grail,” are said to be preparing to sue Mr. Brown for alleged breach of copyright of ideas and research. The author of the book “The Da Vinci Legacy,” Lewis Perdue, is also looking into suing Mr. Brown for alleged plagiarism. Should these cases proceed, the filming of “The Da Vinci Code” starring Harrison Ford will probably be held up.

It doesn’t stop there. Last year a De-Paul University professor, Norman Finkelstein, and the writer Alexander Cockburn accused another prominent professor at Harvard Law School, Alan Dershowitz, of borrowing material in “The Case for Israel.” Mr. Dershowitz followed up with an editorial in the Harvard Crimson in which he accused the pair of “leveling similar attacks on the integrity of many other writers who are either pro-Israel or favor justice for Holocaust survivors” – suggesting they allegedly plagiarized their own previous allegations of plagiarism.

This month, it was reported that a faculty member of the New School University’s Parsons School of Design, Roger Shepherd, resigned after it emerged that he lifted passages from a book by a professor of architecture history at the University of Washington, Meredith Clausen, in Mr. Shepherd’s 2002 book, “Structures of Our Time: 31 Buildings That Changed Modern Life.”

It’s not just authors. In Charlotte, N. C., a minister acknowledged having stolen sermons from other preachers. A court ruled that Barney the Dinosaur’s “I LoveYou” song is set to the same tune as “This Old Man.” And now a Texas-based publicist has admitted to committing plagiarism on several occasions, using huge sections of newspaper articles in his press releases without properly crediting the journalists. (Isn’t it supposed to be the journalists who are too lazy to rewrite press releases?)

According to a recent article in the New York Times, Duke University’s Center for Academic Integrity says 40% of college students admit to plagiarizing off the Internet, up from 10% in 1999. Students don’t have to find old papers or copy passages off the Internet, either – they can buy ready-made papers for a couple of hundred dollars from Web sites likeaceyourpaper.com and schoolsucks.com. With unmanageable workloads and the knowledge that classmates are buying their B-pluses, the siren call can be difficult to ignore.

As the trend trickles down, it’s the lazy kids who suffer most, while the lazy adults just apologize and move on. Doris Kearns Goodwin admitted to indulging in foul play in connection with her 1987 book “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,” but has since gone on to appear on just about every national talk show as one of our nation’s most famous presidential historians. After lifting oratory from a British politician, Senator Biden never won the Democratic presidential nomination, but the folks in Delaware don’t seem to mind. And former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair’s widely publicized transgressions enabled him to score a sweet book deal. Meanwhile, student plagiarists who don’t have the clout or name recognition to dodge the bullets are pretty much burnt toast. They’re left with few options apart from kissing their diplomas goodbye.

The surfeit of stories in the press about sloppy cut-and-paste artists is more than a reflection of how widespread the phenomenon has become. Nobody really cares if little Johnny was sneaky, or if there’s a slightly unoriginal passage on page 354 of a book that we wouldn’t read even if we were stuck at Newark Airport for two days. We feast on these stories of cheating because they offend us in a way that no other horror tale can. They’re immoral, yes, but they also exploit one of our deepest-seated fears: that we’ve forgotten how to be original. If professional thinkers and visionaries can’t even cough up a couple of novel ideas, how on earth are we supposed to rise to the task?