Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life?

Wow there are so many different ways of seeing or thinking about plagiarism. To mast, in the beginning, it would seem like a really bad thing to have people copy from you. But after a while, it can be seen as a compliment to the ‘original’ author. The piece of writing must have been good for people to read it, and like it enough to copy it into their own writing. Not properly citing the work is similar to disrespecting the original author. There are times when people do not mean to plagiarize, or they might cite their sources incorrectly. That is similar to when people don’t show the ‘proper’ respect to others. Using that analogy, it would also help explain the difference between cultures, and even age groups. Going back to the reading, I guess I can see how copying information gathered by a person without consent and using details from the author’s life in a work are two totally different things. Using life details just feels like such a bigger breach of privacy. Between the ownership of words, and copyright laws, this is starting to get a little confusing. Perhaps it is because plagiarism is governed by ethical rules, and to tell the truth, different people have different stands on ethics. It is interesting how there are some cases where it is alright to copy someone else’s work. The rules regarding written work is super strict, and yet there are so many instances where music is somewhat copied from artist to artist, and yet it seems like it is nothing. In the music world, it is seen as influence, or tweaking the original music. While they cannot outright copy the music note for note, having parts that are similar (like patch working in writing) is acceptable in that industry. In the end, I found it a little funny how the person writing the play acknowledges her other sources, just not some of them. And how do you deal with the plagiarist being plagiarized?