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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/23902
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Plagiarism is an academic violation. If you wrote a scholarly article for a professional journal and did not give proper credit to your sources, you would be guilty of plagiarism. If you were caught you might lose academic standing, maybe even lose your job at the university.

But works of fiction are not scholarly articles. We do not normally expect a work of fiction to have footnotes. Fiction writers routinely incorporate moral or philosophical themes into their stories without giving a scholarly discussion of the history of the idea and their sources.

Note that, as a couple of others have implied but I don't think quite stated clearly, there is a big difference between plagiarism and copyright violation. If you write a book, you own a copyright to the specific words used to express that idea. If others copy your words, you can sue them. But copyright law specifically says that you do not have a copyright to an idea, just to the words to express that idea. Plagiarism is copying someone else's ideas without giving proper credit, but plagiarism is not a crime nor a tort: you cannot be arrested or sued for plagiarism. It's an academic violation that can get you in trouble with universities and publishers, you could lose your job or be blacklisted by professional journals, but they can't sue you for it.

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