We know that Shakespeare took whole chunks of Plutarch word for word to use in his Roman plays - though, of course, in doing so he turned them into great poetry. Does this make Shakespeare a plagiarist? Was he a word thief?

Part of the researchers’ process to verify the connection between Shakespeare’s plays and an obscure 16th-century manuscript—of which there previously had been only one copy in the world—was to feed the Shakespearean canon into an open-source tool called WCopyfind, built to catch plagiarism by college students.

In its legal definition, plagiarism includes "both the theft or misrepresentation of intellectual property and the substantial textual copying of another's work". But it is also considered to be a factor of a particular culture or time - that is, in some cultures and in some periods the idea was undefined - which makes it harder to identify precisely. However, the main problem these days is plagiarism in academic writing, which is becoming increasingly common, due to the vast amount of material that has been published which can be accessed via the Internet. This easy access, coupled with the increasing pressure put on students, has led to a rapid rise in incidents of plagiarism. It comes down to who owns the intellectual property in question, and with the advent of the Internet this has become less clearly defined.