Plagiarism as a Culturally-Motivated Crime

Abstract

Abstract The article discusses the possibility of classifying plagiarism as a culturally motivated crime. Creating works, especially written works, is strongly related to culture as well as to knowledge and skills acquired during education. Therefore, plagiarism can be perceived as a culturally-conditioned act, and, thus, differently perceived depending upon the culture with which the artist identifies themselves. The author juxtapose two legal orders, namely of countries where plagiarism is a crime and those where the failure to mark the authorship of a work results from the customs prevailing in their culture, i.e. societies influenced by Confucian philosophy. The research goal is to raise the hypothesis and determine whether the perpetrator of culturally motivated plagiarism can use one of the tools indicated in criminal law, the so-called cultural defense.