Recently I posted something under Humor, which I had seen circulating around the net for the past several years. I found it to be pretty funny and so, when I ran across it again, I posted it, with a few simple edits.
To be honest, until now I had never really considered posting jokes, even long ones, to be considered plagarism. Someone stated that, in order to be perfectly honest, it should have been prefaced with something like "I found this on the net". While I didn't take offense to this poster's comments, I didn't really understand how they could equate reposting a joke with stealing someone's work. But I did think about it for a while.
Stealing someone's serious work, articles, poetry, song lyrics, short stories, etc... has always been obvious plagiarism in my book and an inexcusable breach of ethics. But what about old jokes, even long ones?
For the sake of honesty, I will in the future, make it perfectly clear when I am passing along something humorous that i have found, I wonder how you feel about it? Is retelling a joke plagiarism in your view? Have you ever even given it any thought (as I obviously hadn't)? Now I don't mean posting something funny and outright claiming it as your own work, but simply posting it as you found it (or slightly edited).
After considering it, I have concluded that, while perhaps a minor breach at best, yes it is.
So what do YOU think?