Mark, thanks for the NY Times URL regarding plagiarism. I agree it's tough to define. "Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804." Have I looked up the birth records for myself? Not at all; I accept as fact what many biographers have stated. Is this therefore plagiarism? I think anybody who tried to claim it as such would be laughed out of court. If, however, someone published a work using subtle interpretations of ambiguous evidence to argue that Hawthorne was actually born on July 5, and I now said, without attribution, that "Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 5, 1804," I might very well be guilty of plagiarism (though I'd more likely be accused of carelessness in editing and proofreading), because I am now asserting something that is NOT a "generally accepted fact," and is NOT based on my own research and interpretation of the original records.
There's an analogy here to GRNO's patent applications--they clearly can't patent general petrochemical cracking and distillation processes which have been in use in the industry for over 90 years. Hence all the back and forth communications with the patent reviewers aimed at carefully identifying, clarifying, and limiting the specific innovations for which they are trying to claim patent rights.
I sometimes go by the time-honored, if technically inaccurate, rule of thumb: It's plagiarism if you take all your information from a single source. It's research if you take all your information from many sources.
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