I believe people use unethical practices to cheat because of laziness and lack of preparation. Jack Samuels, the boy who didn't cite his source for his paper, he was shown playing his video game at an early hour in the morning, and just starting it the night before, showing no signs of preparation whatsoever. Since he hadn't worked on it beforehand, he was stuck at 1:30 am with no paper. He chose the easier way out and copied and pasted text to make a paper. The one that I thought should have been let off with a warning was the two students, Mohammad and Sandra, because it didn't seem like that bad of an offense. They should have gotten a warning rather than be expelled, because they were unaware they were doing anything wrong, and they were just trying to help each other. The future problems these students will face are lack of college acceptance, which leads to lack of good jobs, which eventually leads to a harder life, all because they took the easy way out and cheated. The Cambridge University's plagiarism rules clearly state that the Court of Discipline has a right to expel a student for plagiarizing, but usually the penalty is far less extreme, like a small comment on their record, or being forced to drop a class or two.
An example of a recent copyright infringement case is Pharrell and Robin Thicke's music scandal. Marvin Gaye's children pressed charges against Pharrell and Thicke for copying Gaye's "Got to Give It Up" for their own hit song "Blurred Lines." The jury found them guilty of copyright infringement and forced them to pay $7.3 million of the $16 million they made off the song to Gaye's children. Here's a
link to the article.
