Something You Should Know - Why It's Good to Feel Guilty & How Plagiarism Really Works

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

There’s a reason hearing your mother’s voice can feel different from hearing anyone else’s — even when it’s just a phone call. This episode opens with the surprising effects researchers have discovered. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-psychology-of-relationships/202104/two-key-reasons-why-you-should-call-your-mom Guilt feels terrible — and that’s exactly what makes it so effective. While we tend to see guilt as something to avoid, it may actually play an essential role in helping us learn, repair relationships, and behave more ethically. Christopher Moore explains why guilt exists, how it evolved, and why feeling guilty can sometimes be a very good thing. Christopher is a professor of psychology and former dean of science at Dalhousie University, whose work has been cited in Psychology Today, Today’s Parent, and The New York Times. He is author of The Power of Guilt: Why We Feel It and Its Surprising Ability to Heal (https://amzn.to/3Nrt051). Plagiarism seems like a clear-cut wrongdoing — but the reality is far more complicated. People plagiarize more often than you might think, sometimes without even realizing it. And in some cases, you can be accused of plagiarism even if you’ve never seen the original work. With only so many ways to tell a story or write a song, where does coincidence end and plagiarism begin? Roger Kreuz joins me to explore this fascinating gray area. He is Associate Dean and professor of psychology at the University of Memphis, a columnist for Psychology Today, and author of Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots. (https://amzn.to/4soVFaS). And finally, there’s a widespread belief that dark roast coffee has more caffeine than light roast — or that espresso packs far more caffeine than a regular cup of coffee. Both ideas sound logical, but they’re not quite right. We wrap up by explaining what actually determines caffeine content and why these myths persist. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/light-vs-dark-roast-coffee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. Today on something you should know, why the next time you're stressed out, you might want to call your mom. Then it feels terrible to feel guilty, but there are some real benefits to it. And the point about guilt is that it serves to manage our relationships and help to heal our relationships when they've been damaged. And really, guilt is the emotion that motivates us to do something about healing our relationships when we've done something to harm them.

Also, which has more caffeine, light roast, or dark roast coffee? And plagiarism. It's a complicated and fascinating topic. There are people who claim that plagiarists want to get caught. It's like kleptomania. There's a certain kind of compulsion for taking the work of others. I'm not really convinced by that argument, but at the same time, I don't really have a better explanation. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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The Shakers, The Testament of Anne Lee, now playing in an exclusive Toronto engagement in theaters everywhere January 23rd. Something You Should Know. Fascinating Intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Have you called your mother lately? I'm about to explain why you probably should as we begin this episode of Something You Should know.

Hi, I'm Mike Carruthers. Research suggests that hearing your mother's voice can be a possible. powerful stress reliever. This is especially true for children and seems to be true for adults as well. In a well-known study, researchers found that after a stressful experience, children who heard their mother's voice, even just over the phone, showed lower stress levels and a rise in oxytocin, the hormone that's associated with bonding and comfort. In fact, hearing mom's voice had a similar calming effect on the brain as receiving a physical. hug. Oxytocin is released during childbirth and early caregiving, and it plays a key

role in forming the deep emotional bond between parent and child, a bond that often lasts a lifetime. While the strongest evidence comes from studies on children, scientists believe familiar trusted voices continue to have a calming effect well into adulthood. So if you happen to have a voicemail from your mom saved on your phone, you might want to keep it. It could be a small, portable, dose of comfort ready whenever you needed. And that is something you should know. Have you ever felt guilty? I'm sure you have. All of us have.

Guilt is one of the most powerful and uncomfortable emotions we experience. Guilt can sit in the back of your mind and just gnaw at you. It can keep you up at night. It's an emotion most of us would do just about anything to a moment. avoid. But guilt exists for a reason. So why do we feel it? Where did it come from? And when guilt becomes overwhelming, how do you live with it without letting it eat you up inside? That's something my guest knows a lot about. Chris Moore holds a PhD in developmental psychology and his work has been cited in psychology today, today's parent, and the New York Times. He's the author of a book

call the power of guilt, why we feel it and its surprising ability to heal. Hi, Christopher. Welcome to something you should know. Pleasure to be here, Mike. So guilt is something everybody's experienced, everybody knows what it is, everybody knows how horrible it feels. But what is it from your perspective? How do you define what guilt is? So I define guilt as obviously an emotion, actually a complex of emotions, but I define it as a good thing. The point about guilt is that it serves to manage our relationships and help to heal our relationships when they've been damaged. And really, guilt is the emotion that motivates us to do something about healing our relationships

when we've done something to harm them. Well, based on what you've said so far, the purpose of guilt, the reason we have it is to manage relationships. And we do that because if we screw up our relationships and feel guilty, we want to fix that and that feeling feels so horrible that then we want to avoid feeling that again in the future. You know, humans are the most social of all species, right? We live continually in a highly, highly complex social world and our relationships are an extremely important aspect of our worlds. And the problem is that if we, you know, we continually do things all the time, to greater or lesser extent,

that's going to hurt our relationships, right? Sometimes we act selfishly and so on. And so we need to have a way of, you know, of healing the relationships when they become damaged. And so really that is what guilt does. It motivates us to heal those relationships and keep those relationships strong. I would imagine that most people think of guilt

as not a real positive emotion. It doesn't feel good when you feel guilty, but yet it is very, useful to have have it because imagine if we didn't have it if we didn't feel guilty then we would do whatever we want I guess exactly and there are people like that of course so one of the characteristics of psychopaths is that they don't feel any guilt they don't feel remorse for things that they do and of course the relationships the psychopaths have are severely disrupted and so you're right

the guilt is a very it's a functional form of the motion that keeps the relationships that we have strong. And are there people on the other end of the spectrum who guilt is just like debilitating, like they feel guilty about everything or too much of everything? Yeah, I mean, there is this phenomenon that we call guilt-proneness. So guilt-proneness means that you tend to feel a lot of guilt. You're very sensitive to other people's feelings. It tends to be in people who are very empathic, for example, who are very sensitive to other people being upset about things.

And so people who feel, who are guilt prone, tend to feel guilt in a lot of circumstances and a lot of relationships that they have. The other way in which guilt goes wrong is when sometimes it fails to achieve its purpose, if you like. So we may feel guilt, but we do not successfully resolve the guilt through, you know, making up with the person that we might have hurt. And then the guilt festers and becomes debilitating. And you see that in a variety of mental health disorders, including things like depression, to some extent in PTSD and so on.

So does guilt cause depression or does depression worsen the guilt, which is the cart and which is the horse? Guilt tends to exacerbate or make depression worse, and it tends to prolong it. So if you're constantly feeling bad about yourself, then, you know, the depression can just continue. So I wouldn't say that guilt causes depression, but it's certainly a factor in how depressed you feel and perhaps for how long the depression can go on. So when you feel guilty,

if you've done something that, gee, you really wish you hadn't done it and it's hurt a relationship, and you do your best to, you know, apologize, but you still feel guilty. I mean, you still did what you did, and you still feel guilty that you did what you did. So what makes guilt go away? Does it just kind of fade away, or what happens to it?

So I think the way to understand that is that there are different levels or layers to guilt. So part of guilt is stimulated by doing something. Let's say you've done something to hurt somebody that you care about. And you may feel guilty because of that. Now, if that person, let's say you apologize. to that person, that person forgives you, then your guilt does tend to dissipate. Okay, so at the sort of most basic layer, guilt is dissipated by forgiveness from the person that you care about. But then there is another layer of guilt which we connect to this idea

of conscience. So conscience is the set of standards or norms that we hold for ourselves, which we think means that we're a good person or that we're. we behave well. And sometimes we hold ourselves to a higher standard, perhaps, than even other people would. And so sometimes guilt can arise from us doing something that contravenes the norms or standards of our conscience, and we may feel guilty about that. And sometimes, you know, then the most important thing is to be able to recognize that perhaps you're holding yourself to too high a standard and cut yourself some slack and give yourself a break. And to some extent, we call that self-forgiveness.

You know, that's why guilt can go on, even if you've been forgiven by other people. But boy, being forgiven by other people certainly helps, doesn't it? Very much so. I think that is the fundamental dynamic in human relationships. You know, relationships are important to us, but that doesn't mean that we're not going to mess up. and we mess up quite frequently, even with the people that we love. But if we apologize and do that honestly and are forgiven by the person that we love,

then the guilt does tend to dissipate. And so what is it that's going on? And maybe the kind of stereotypical example of this is say somebody has an affair and they get caught and they feel guilty and they feel terrible and they're forgiven, but then they do it again. Well, what's that? Well, I think that's just, you know, the relationships are a continual challenge, right? There's always another opportunity for you to mess up.

And the problem is that you can't, if you keep messing up in the same way, and, you know, continuing to apologize, it's not necessarily going to work with the other person. because a good apology requires a commitment not to do it again. And so if you do do it again, then in a sense that invalidates the apology and the forgiveness can be withdrawn. Well, right. Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way. But that's interesting what you said, that, you know, relationships, you know, are opportunities to mess up. And not just romantic relationships, but, you know, you can screw up any relationship if you put your mind to it. Yeah, absolutely.

relationships need constant, a constant challenge. They need constant monitoring. Now, we exist with relationships because they're also extremely important to us, extremely beneficial and extremely rewarding. But that doesn't mean they're going to be perfect all the time. So here's the thing about guilt that I find so interesting. People feel guilt, it seems, when they get caught. So are they feeling guilty for what they did,

or are they feeling guilty because they got caught? So interesting. So I think when you get caught, in a sense, that's proof that the relationship is under threat, because now the other person knows what you did. And so that means that the relationship is under threat. If you do something that you think has hurt another person or could, let's say, could have heard another person, but they don't find out, then in a sense the relationship isn't under threat. And so you may not feel guilty about it, right?

But the guilt comes when you know that the relationship is under threat. And so if somebody else finds out what you've done, then that's proof that the relationship is under threat. And there comes the guilt. I want to dig a little deeper into this in just a moment. I'm talking with Chris Moore. He's author of the book The Power of Guilt, why we feel it and its surprising ability to heal.

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like Countess Lewann and Teresa Judice, Smart Recaps, Insider Energy, and Zero Fluff. Listen to All About Tierage podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, new episodes weekly. So, Chris, you sometimes see on TV some, you know, courtroom show or some, you know, true crime Dateline thing where the guy's in the courtroom and he's very sorry for the, you know, grisly murder he committed. And, you know, but I, again, I wonder, like, is he sorry that he committed the murder or is he sorry that he's standing here in a court of law and he's been found guilty? Well, you know, the way that I would put it is that, yes, he's sorry that he's got

caught because, you know, clearly there are going to be consequences. But in many cases of relationships, it's really sorrow, as I said before, that, sorry that the relationship is now under threat, that you may be losing somebody that ultimately you care about. Okay. I mean, in a court, the courtroom situation is, I think, a little bit different because there, of course, the sorrow may not actually be guilt. It may just be, you know, fear of the consequences that, you know, you're now going to, you know, going to have to suffer the consequences of the crime. And that's a little bit different from guilt. Yeah. But oftentimes in those situations, the,

in a courtroom, you know, the defendant is confronted with victims, family members, where now they really get to see the damage that they've done. So maybe they do start to feel guilty, obviously way too late. But maybe that is a little guilt because they're seeing the devastation that they caused that they hadn't maybe thought about before. Yeah, I completely agree with that. And I think this is an opportunity maybe to say a little bit more about how guilt is constituted emotionally. So in my view, guilt is not a simple emotion. It's actually a complex of

different emotions. And one of the most important ones is empathy or sadness for the other person. So when you see that the other person is really hurt, as in the case that you just articulated, that starts to stimulate empathy for the other person. And that empathy is an important component of the guilt that you feel because you feel sorrow or compassion. for the other person. Okay. So, so guilt has these other emotional pieces to it. There's the, there's the compassion for the other person. There's to some extent, um, self-directed anger as well. So you feel angry at yourself for what you did, right? So you have this self-directed anger. You have compassion for the other person. And then you have some fear as well, fear that either

the relationship that you had with that person is now damaged or a heart. or fear for yourself for other reasons. I want to talk about forgiveness. You know, you sometimes hear people say, they can forgive, but they can't forget, that what you did, you can't make it go away. You can't unremember it. So it seems like, you know,

depending on the severity of whatever you did, forgiveness is good, but what you did is what you did and that it never really goes away. Yeah, and I think that's, true but I think the important thing about relationships is that firstly a number of important things firstly that there's two sides to a relationship okay is it's typically not the case that one person is doing the harm but you know quite often

in relationships you know guilt goes both ways and the important thing about relationships is if they're gonna survive then both have to be willing to bend towards the other right to to recognize when they've done harm to the other apologize for it but also be willing to forgive the other when they do something to harm you. Okay? So it's important to think of relationships as a two-way street. So what do we do with this?

I mean, knowing what you know, how do we do anything different or is this just something to observe and notice and say that's interesting? My message I think is to recognize the guilt is actually a positive emotion. It may feel horrible, it may feel bad, but it actually is good for us, right? And what it does is it helps to strengthen our relationships, as I've said. So that's the message, right? So when we feel guilty, we shouldn't think, oh, we're a bad person. Okay?

We don't deserve anything. You know, I think what it means is that we're actually a sympathetic or an empathetic person. That when we feel guilt, it means that we care about other people. And then we should act on that guilt. We should do whatever is needed in order to restore the relationship that we have. So I think the message is primarily a positive message. It's one that says that guilt is a good thing and it's good for us, good for our relationships. Sometimes people feel guilty when it seems like objectively they shouldn't.

Here's my example. So you're driving your car and somebody hits your car and then your car slides into somebody else's car. And there's that sense of maybe that you feel guilty that you feel guilty, that you've hit that other car, but you didn't do it. It wasn't anything you did, but you still feel guilty. And it seems like that guilt is misplaced. Yeah, I mean, and guilt can be misplaced. There's no question about that. And I think in part, you know, what we have to understand is, well, first of all, the guilt is an emotional reaction. It's more like a gut reaction. It's not a rational process of thought, right? We don't figure out, do we have responsibility?

And then if we do feel guilty about it, we just feel guilty when bad things happen. And in part, that's because of the complex of emotions that I talked about. In part, it's the fear of the being repercussions. In part, it's the empathy for the person who was harmed. So those are all the ingredients, if you like, that can lead to guilt. But the important point is that the guilt is not a rational psychological process, right, as a gut reaction. And, you know, there are lots of cases of people who feel guilt when it really wasn't their fault. But if the relationship was damaged anyway, this still is a

tendency to feel guilt. And this can happen in everyday situations. Let's say, you know, just to give you an example, you were working in an office and you had a friend in the office and you got a promotion and they didn't get a promotion. Right? That's nothing to do with you. you didn't cause that. You may still feel guilty, right? Because in some way, your relationship with them may be impacted by the fact that, um, that you did well and they didn't. Um, or, you know, to take a case of, which is a little bit, uh, you know, an unfortunate situation, um, in things like, intimate partner violence, right? It's quite often the person who's been violated may feel guilty, right, even though, of course, they did not do anything. You know, they were the one that was harmed or

violated, but they may still feel guilty because the relationship that they had was harmed and they may feel like, well, what if I did do something? What if it is my fault somehow? Right. And my point is that the guilt is a gut reaction to the relationship being harmed, not necessarily because you had any responsibility for it. Well, that's interesting because that example you just gave of, you know, you get a promotion and your friend didn't get one. I don't know that I would feel guilty. I would feel bad and maybe that's guilt,

but I wouldn't categorize it as guilt. I would, because I had nothing to do with it. Yeah, and I think what you're taking there is a sort of a, in a sense, analyzing the responsibility. But in the moment, what we find is that when that happens, people do get a twinge of guilt under those circumstances. Now, if they might then analyze, the situation and say, well, you know, it's nothing to do with me. I have no responsibility.

But often guilt doesn't work that way. Guilt works, as I said, as an emotional reaction to circumstances where quite often it's not awful at all. What about the many times that people do something and feel guilty and there is no forgiveness? For any number of reasons, there's no forgiveness to be had? No, it's true and it can be devastating. And that's the kind of guilt that can go on forever, confess to forever. And under those circumstances, it is important to be able to find ways to resolve the guilt oneself, even without forgiveness.

You know, one of the things that I think is very important here is to recognize that self-forgiveness can play a role. And what I mean by self-forgiveness is the ability. to recognize that you did something wrong, you feel bad about it, you've done everything you can to, you know, to repair any relationship that was harmed or damaged. And even if forgiveness was not forthcoming,

there's nothing more you can do. And therefore, you can forgive yourself. And it's almost like saying, you know, if somebody did that to me, and they did everything that they could in their power to make things right, would I forgive them? So in effect, turn the tables. And if you can say to yourself, yes, I would forgive them under those circumstances,

then it's only natural that you should forgive yourself for what you've done. Well, you know, oftentimes when people, you know, do something horrible and they go to jail or whatever, you know, and the victims will say something like, well, he has to live with that for the rest of his life. that's what this is all about, right? I mean, that's that, that's what keeps the guardrails up, is that feeling of feeling terrible and feeling guilty, which keeps us on the straight and narrow. Yes, exactly.

We need to have those kind of psychological mechanisms, those guardrails, as you put it, the emotions, that do keep us on the straight and narrow. Otherwise, it's chaos. You know, a world that had only psychopaths and it would be complete chaos. Well, this is really enlightening because guilt is something we all feel. We all hate feeling it. But to hear your perspective on it, it's not necessarily all a bad thing.

In fact, it has some real benefits. I've been speaking with Chris Moore. He is author of the book The Power of Guilt, Why We Feel It and its surprising ability to heal. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Chris, thank you for coming on and explaining this. Thank you very much, Mike. When they were young, the five members of an elite commando group nicknamed the Stone Wolves raged against the oppressive rule of the Kradiracian Empire, which occupies and dominates

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Season 1, The Rookie. Search for Scott Sigler, S-I-G-L-E-R, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and of course, kids of all ages. But you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships, and, you know, periods, The Longest Shortest Time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at Longest Shortestime.com. When you hear the word plagiarism, it's almost never in a positive light.

It's lumped in there with cheating and dishonesty. It's taking someone else's work and passing it off as your own. We've all seen the headlines. Songwriters accused of stealing from other songs. Politicians and celebrities caught. copying speeches or passages they claim they wrote. But plagiarism turns out to be a lot more complicated than it first appears. Sometimes two songs sound strikingly similar,

and it might just really be coincidence. After all, there's only so many musical notes and chord progressions. In other cases, people may copy without realizing it, influenced by ideas they've absorbed through the years, but forgotten where they came from. And now, with AI creating content that draws on massive amounts of existing work, the line between inspiration, borrowing, and outright plagiarism is blurrier than ever. So what actually counts as plagiarism?

When is similarity suspicious? And when is it inevitable? And how do our brains, our culture, and our technology all factor into this? That's what we're about to explore with Roger Cruz, He's Associate Dean and Professor of Psychology at the University of Memphis and a monthly columnist for Psychology Today. He's author of a book called Strikingly Similar, Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots.

Hey, Roger, welcome. Well, welcome back. Good to have you back on something you should know. Well, thank you so much. So what is plagiarism exactly? I think people have a notion, an idea of what it is and when it happens, but for the purposes of our discussion, what is plagiarism? I think it can be defined as the appropriation of someone else's words or ideas without acknowledgement or compensation.

And must it be intentional and willful, or can plagiarism exist? And oops, I don't know how that happened. That's the real issue. A lot of people who are caught plagiarizing will say that it was unintentional. And probably in many cases it was, but that's the real issue, is that we have a very broad term that runs the gamut from simple inadvertent failure to subtestitation to, you know, wholesale copying. We have this one term that refers to a very wide variety of behaviors and motivations. I think that's part of where the problem lies with regards to thinking about what this term refers to. And so when I think of plagiarism, I think of like, you know, college term papers or songs or books or things.

But does plagiarism exist elsewhere? In virtually every sphere of life, you can think about this as being a possible issue. It is an issue for people who create encyclopedias, for people who create maps, for people who are engaged in a whole variety of activities. there are always people who are going to step forward and say, well, that was my idea, or that was my song, or that was my, you know, line in a poem. So it really is the case that it's quite broad in terms of the kinds of activities that are involved with this. But where, and I guess it's often up to a judge if it goes to court, but where's the line? I mean, there's only so many words you can put in so many orders to make a point,

or there's only so many notes that you can make a song with. At what point is it just that's the way it works, and when is it plagiarism? Yeah, ultimately it comes down to an issue of copyright infringement. Plagiarism itself is not illegal, but copyright infringement is. And so when plagiarism cases go to trial, that's the actual charge, copyright infringement. And it really comes down to what you can convince a judge or a jury to believe. And the problem is that the judges and juries have different ideas about what's term means.

And whether it's applicable to, for example, you know, five notes repeated in a song or even just a baseline in a song, it's harder with music because, of course, the vocabulary is smaller. But it's the same problem that we see in written words as well. To what, how much copying must there be before one believes that. there is intent behind it. And that's the issue that's difficult to resolve because it's quite often quite subjective. Well, I know there have been cases. One case that comes to mind is George Harrison of the Beatles was sued over his song My Sweet Lord. I think the claim was that it sounded too much like he's so fine by the Chaffauns. Well, there's a case where I have to believe

George Harrison was a pretty good songwriter. He's one of the Beatles. He probably didn't need to intentionally go rip off he's so fine to create my sweet lord it seems if it's similar that it wasn't intentional yeah the harrison case is quite complex and um the claim was made that even if it's unconscious that's still infringement that even if you aren't intending to copy if it can be proven to a reasonable doubt that you were copying then it doesn't matter of according to some judges, whether it's conscious or unconscious, the end result is the same. But try to prove unconscious intent, that gets very slippery and very psychological. Well, it just seems so subjective and random.

And here's a perfect example, I guess. A song has notes in it. And there are probably a million songs with the same two notes right next to each other. Well, is two notes plagiarism, or does it need to be three notes or four or five or six or seven notes? I mean, there's no objective standard. So, and it seems so common for notes to be next to each other, at what point do you call it plagiarism? And with words, I mean, how many words have to be the same words in the same order before it's plagiarism? Two, three, four, five?

There are some phrases that are so commonly used. One example is the bloody three-day battle of Gettysburg. And if you Google that those words, you'll find lots of examples online of that phrase, but it's not necessarily infringement. It simply exists as one way to describe an event. And what has to happen in the courtroom is that once again, intent is really the point. The issue is output. If a judge or a jury believes that there is a substantial similarity between the work of one

person and the work of somebody else, then they can be awarded damages. And the problem is it could be conscious, it could be unconscious, intentional, unintentional, in the eyes of the law, if you can convince the judge or jury, then it is that thing. Copyright infringement only occurs if someone complains, right? If you use somebody else's music and they don't mind, well, then there's no problem. And unfortunately, the problem becomes when you could profit from basically saying that somebody else's work is like your work. So if an artist writes a song, that's an homage to a different artist. The artist might be flattered or they might say, that's too similar to my work. You're actually capitalizing my notoriety and therefore I'm going to sue you. So even in some cases

trying to show respect or admiration for a previous person's work and trying to imitate that work can cross a line that some artists might find very problematic. But somebody has to sue. Right. The original artist has to sue. A really interesting case is fan fiction. This is when somebody takes the characters and world building of somebody else and uses that for their own purposes. It actually began with Star Trek fan fiction. When the series was canceled in the late 60s, a bunch of people began to write new stories based upon the same characters, the same ship, the same kinds of adventures. And you can't publish that work. It would be a violation of the copyright of the people who created the series originally, but a lot of it circulated online.

And now there's a huge amount of fan fiction, literally millions of stories that exist online, of the Harry Potter universe, Almost any work of fiction or any movie, you can read people writing stories about that. And some authors hate that. They regard their characters as their children. Anne Rice, the woman who wrote an interview with a vampire, was famous for sending out these cease and desist letters to people who are trying to develop the characters in their own stories. Whereas other authors are actually quite, they don't have a real problem with it. C.S. Lewis thought it was perfectly fine for people to write new Narnia stories. And so you can see how the perspective of the creator, it runs the gamut of this is fine to,

this is terrible, and I'm going to sue you. So that adds more complications to the story of what's going on here in terms of intent and in terms of whether people would, you know, want to litigate against that. So we hear about what you just described of that there are things you're not supposed to do, not supposed to use other people's music, you're not supposed to use other people's art, but people do, and they could be sued, but how often do they get sued? Is it common or is it uncommon? I originally believe that it was relatively uncommon, but the more research that I conducted, the more I found that cases have been litigated, or more commonly it's resolved through out-of-court process where a lawyer representing one artist might send a

letters saying, gee, you know, you ripped us off and there might be an out-of-a-court settlement. In fact, that's often what happens because people want to keep out of the news. And so you have these allegations of plagiarism, and you never hear anything more about it because the party is settled privately out of court. That seems to be very common, especially in the music world, where charges of appropriation and plagiarism can affect reputations in a fairly major sort of way. So a lot of it's handled in a private way. And that makes it even harder to know exactly how much of it's going on.

But is it your sense that there are thousands of cases or there's a couple dozen cases or in a year? Or, I mean, is this rampant or is this infrequent? I naively assumed it was fairly infrequent. And then the more research I did, the more I was just astonished at how much there is. There is a mention of plagiarism about once a week in the New York Times, for example. and that has increased dramatically over the last couple of decades. There are periods of time when it's not been talking about very much at all, and therefore it probably was not as big of a problem,

but today it seems to be a major issue. And that may be a reflection of our more litigious society that people are more likely to sue other people or that the ideas about ownership have changed over time. When Shakespeare was running his play, there wasn't no real idea of ownership. Shakespeare ripped off lots of people Almost all of the great writers from the early modern period were borrowing each other's plots,

in some case, each other's characters, and that was sincere to be fine. How does the term intellectual property weave its way into this discussion? Is this all intellectual property that we're talking about? Yeah, intellectual property, or just IP, as people call it, that's a relatively recent phenomenon as well. it really goes hand to hand with the discussion of copyright. And for our purposes today, they're pretty much identical. The idea being that when you create some work, maybe it's a song, maybe it's a short story,

that there is implicit copyright and that that work is your intellectual property. But even extends further than that, you know, if you create a character like Harry Potter, that character is intellectual property. It might be copyrighted certain books that were written by the author, but the actual idea of Harry Potter can be thought of as intellectual property. But is the claim, I didn't know, I had no idea, I've never heard of that, I've never seen that, I have no idea, is that a valid legal claim? No, the U.S. case law is pretty clear. The defense I didn't know or I wasn't aware is problematic.

There was a case a number of years ago where the claim was that it was possible that an artist heard an earlier song maybe 20 years before they wrote their own. And yet a jury believed that, yeah, that's good enough for me. I believe that that could have lodged a certain musical idea in that person's mind, and therefore, even though they didn't intend to, you know, consciously plagiarized, that this idea was nonetheless expressed in work that owed something to the original. And if you convince a judge and jury that that's a good story, that will actually get you some money in the court of law. How much money? I mean, is this a punitive thing or is this, you know,

if I say, well, because of what you did, I can prove that there are damages to me and then so you give me that money. Or if there are no damages, it's just, you know, you copied my thing. but I didn't lose anything because of it, then you don't get anything. A very common way that's handled in the music world is that somebody who perhaps inadvertently copied something

might get it as a co-writer for that song and therefore get the royalties from that work. That's a relatively common way in which this is done. A lot of artists don't have deep pockets, and so suing them wouldn't necessarily lead to a big windfall, although I can in some cases. But being added as a co-writer would ensure you some sort of compensation in the future

as the royalties accrue for that work. I'm fascinated by people, and I can think of several cases where people have been outed as truly copying, like in their book, word for word, they have copied from some other place. And I wonder, well, why would you do that? Why would you at least not rework it a little bit?

to hide the fact that you're using somebody else's work. But there are cases of people, you know, word for word copying. And I don't get the thinking there. Yeah, even having thought about this now for several years, I'm still mystified by this. Because in some respects, it's not all that hard to even paraphrase somebody else. So why on earth would you do something that might lead to serious issues for you down the line by copying page after page?

somebody else's work. There are people who claim that plagiarists want to get caught. That's like kleptomania. There's a certain kind of compulsion that people have for taking the work of others. I'm not really convinced by the argument, but at the same time, I don't really have a better explanation. Is plagiarism, copyright infringement, is it on the rise? Is it just a constant that's always here and it's always about the same?

Or is it on the decline or what? From what I can tell, it's never been easier to get away with plagiarism, simply because so much material is being produced every year. Think about the number of books, the number of songs, the number of stories that are published each year. It's a vast amount. And people aren't out there checking. In many cases, the plagiarism that does exist was discovered by accident.

It's very common, for example, for a fan of a certain artist to say, gee, that sounds just like my favorite song. I'm going to write to the original artist and ask them that they're aware of this. And that's how it comes to the attention, for example, of somebody who has been infringed upon. So because there aren't people out, they're really checking for it, and so much information is being produced, so many texts, so many songs are being produced, it really makes it relatively easy to escape detection. It really is the case that unless people are looking, they're going to get away with it. The other side, our tools for finding it are better than ever.

So many students who have gone through college in the last 20 years or so have had to deal with a program called Turn It In, where an instructor can actually upload a paper written by a student. And then the service compares that paper to a vast warehouse of documents that already exists. exist and can then create a similarity score. And then it's up to the instructor to decide, is this amount of copying inadvertent or was it deliberate? It gets very tricky for a lot of instructors and they find themselves really conflicted about making accusations of plagiarism when in some cases that may not be appropriate. Well, in a case of, you know, take a subject like history. I mean, there's only so many ways to describe an historical event.

And many of those historical events have been written about, by many, many people. And so it seems likely that you would write about it in a way that someone else would write about it. But that doesn't seem fair to call it plagiarism. There's only so many ways to tell about the childhood of Abraham Lincoln. There's only so many stories you can tell there, and they're going to be similar because they're based upon the same historical facts.

But whether or not people were actually cribbing from other people's books, that's the issue. Yeah. Wow. Well, and the song thing always gets me because of the fact that there's only, you know, so many combinations of notes you can put that, you know, it just, it seems like you're going to run into repetition because you're so limited by what a song can be. And that is a defense that many people have used who have been litigated against, you know, the envelope of pleasing sounds to Western ears is that. actually quite small. Think about all the possible middle combinations you could have. Many of them are very dissonant. There's only going to be a relatively small number of combinations that are going to be

considered aesthetically pleasing in our culture at least. And therefore, it really is a very limited vocabulary that these artists are working with. And so you might have one song and have like four or five different people say, gee, that sounds like my song. And in a way, they're right. But in a way, they're wrong as well, because it probably really is just an artist working by themselves, but with this very limited palette of notes that they can make use of. Well, this is something everybody needs to be aware of, because I think there's this belief that, you know, I'm fine. I'm safe from being accused of plagiarizing something because I would never deliberately do that.

But deliberately isn't a defense. I've been talking with Roger Cruz. He's Associate Dean and Professor of Psychology at the University of Memphis, and he has a monthly column in psychology today, and he's author of a book called Strikingly Similar, Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots. There's a link to his book at Amazon and the show notes. Roger, this was great. Thank you.

You're very welcome. Contrary to what many people believe, dark-roast coffee does not contain more caffeine than light-roast coffee, just because it's darker and tastes stronger. In fact, studies show that light and dark-roasted beans contain very similar amounts of caffeine overall, and any small difference comes from how the beans are measured. Lighter roasted beans are denser,

so a scoop can contain slightly more caffeine than the same scoop of darker beans. Now, a lot of people believe espresso has more caffeine than regular coffee, because espresso is brewed by forcing hot water through finely ground coffee in a short amount of time, and that does create a higher concentration of caffeine per ounce. But because a single shot of espresso is so much smaller than a full cup of drip coffee, a regular cup of coffee ends up with more total caffeine. So the bottom line is the difference in caffeine,

between light and dark roast coffee is minimal. It's the brewing method and serving size that has much more to do with how much caffeine you actually consume. And that is something you should know. You know, it's kind of hard to explain, and I'm not sure I completely understand it anyway, but when you share this podcast with other people, it is that power of word-of-mouth marketing that, boy,

it really does make a difference. It helps us grow our audience. It helps us become more visible. So please, if you can, share this podcast with someone you know, it's a great way to support the show. I'm Mikeer Rothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. There is so much going on right now in the world of reproductive health, and we're covering it all.

Birth control, pregnancy, gender, bodily autonomy, menopause, consent, sperm, so many stories about sperm, and of course the joys and absurdities of raising kids of all ages. If you're new to the show, check out an episode called The Staircase. It's a personal story of mine about trying to get my kids school to teach sex ed. Spoiler, I get it to happen, but not at all in the way that I wanted. We also talk to plenty of non-parents, so you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, the longest shortest time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at longest shortest time.com.