Apart from establishing a definition of something that broad, how do they even enforce this rule? Are they going to patrol the corridors, station informants near the cubicles to listen in on everyone's discussions? Monitor emails and flag certain keywords? Maybe they just want a convenient way to fire someone in retaliation to exactly the type of speech that tyrants don't want to hear (usually criticism of themselves).

To run a Word Processor.

Plagiarism is definitely not worth spreading, however it's a mistake to call all derived works, works that reference others (e.g. for criticism and review) and even copied works "plagiarism" - apologies, you used the term but I was referring to derived/copied works that still give credit to the original author, I should have been clear about that. I'm not saying that people who produce content should have their works immediately copied and shared, that's what I meant when I indicated that copyrighting these works for limited amount of time is a good thing. And definitely provides incentive for content creators. What I am saying is that this limit should not be forever, or even a 'long' time. The reality is that a lot of content/material is not even owned by by the original author, but rather by a publishing company, record company, etc. Yes the author is still likely to get paid for their work, but proportionally the profit earned from the work is much less in the favour of the author. The uneducated masses are the people that cannot afford or do not have access to higher levels of education. With the current trend these people will be less equiped to be able to consume and evaluate quality sources of information, if they will even be able to afford it. It feels as though average people's consumption of information will gradually be more and more limited. Before we used to more heavily rely on public libraries. While it's true that most people could not afford having all of the books or even most of them, they were allowed access and under fair use were even permitted to make copies of books, journals, etc. available there. These content filters have so far offered very little in the way of protecting that fair use as far as the internet is concerned. The internet may not be completely wrecked, but IMO will be damaged as a result.

While stopping plagiarism isn't necessarily a bad thing in the short term, the more restrictions are placed on the content the more the people 'at the bottom' miss out, and the more out of reach the really valuable content is. To me it looks like the internet is becoming the complete opposite of what it was meant for - a network to facilitate the spread of information. Given how much we now rely on the internet for the proliferation of information, rules like this turn the internet into more of an impeder for information. At least the quality information that is up-to-date (obviously copyright applies to more than just Netflix shows and sports highlights). I agree with you though, it won't necessarily *break* the internet. But I wonder at what point governments realise that already undereducated masses are being left further behind? Then reversing the damage with legislation that butts heads with the larger corporations may not even be possible.