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I’m interested, though I’m not going to dive deeply into the topic right now, in how the concept of plagiarism operates differently with coding than it does with say an academic essay. I made an image that is the wireframe face of Andross, the villain in the Star Fox game series, with “SI SI SI” in the background as a crude imitation of Mussalini’s fascist headquarters. To code this, I found example code on the P5js website for text, that showed text cascading down with the opacity diminishing as it went down. I took that code and repurposed it for my image. There are lines of code directly lifted from that example but nobody in the coding world would think that it’s plagiarism because it is the most efficient way to go about doing the thing that I’m doing.

That isn’t to say that lifting code is a free-for-all. Video game creators must get licenses for the graphics engines that their game uses to render its world. We must pay for operating systems (unless we’re using Linux) because that code is copyrighted. There is a threshold for how much code you can lift from other source but that threshold is much higher than it would be in an essay where the emphasis is on citing everything you got from somewhere else, no matter how small.

It makes sense on some level because, within coding, there is a way to do a particular thing in a very efficient way and it would make no sense to have extraneous code if you witnessed another person’s code that streamlined that process. But, there’s also something poetic? about elegant code. You’re banging your head against the programming language, getting nowhere, or not getting far enough quickly enough, and then you see somebody masterfully accomplish that same goal in a few lines of code. Are we not obliged to cite the source, even if it’s only a couple lines of code? But also, who is to say that the person you’re getting the code from didn’t get it somewhere else? Provenance is also a murky concept in the coding world.

I don’t know what to make of all of this at the moment, which may seem like a cop-out, but this is the beginning of a thread of thought I will follow going forward.