- “According to Richard Posner, a judge for the United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and author of The Little Book of Plagiarism, “. . . in Shakespeare’s time, unlike ours, creativity was understood to be improvement rather than originality—in other words, creative imitation.” He goes on to explain that “the puzzle is not that creative imitation was cherished in Shakespeare’s time, as it is today, but that ‘originality’ in the modern sense, in which the imitative element is minimized or at least effectively disguised, was not.” In his book he explains that the concept of originality and plagiarism arose during the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth century. Before this time, it was unusual for artists, architects, scientists, or writers to sign their work. Innovation and creativity were understood to be collaborative efforts in which one idea was copied from another and evolved through incremental enhancements. The concept of plagiarism didn’t exist. Copying and creating were rooted in the same thing. The person who copied had an obligation to improve the copy, that was it.” Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others (David Kord Murray) Page 17