There are things that are somewhat shocking to our reasoning and, to an extent, these things, or facts really, are what we may know of or we just do not want to be conscious of it. There have been a lot of talks and discussions going on around the world and something keeps coming up:That we, as humans, have not been able to create anything -be it ideas, fashion, etc- absolutely new, we've only create them from preexisting things. I think this proposition may be viable because humans were created to “multiply" scripturally, we all know we can't multiply what isn't there. Thus, the fact that we never create anything “original" is not irrational afterall.

This act of creating things from preexisting things could be called “sampling", “copying", and some other terminologies from other fields it cannot be totally called illegal or illegitimate by some people because they feel it's the “normal" thing. In music, for example, “sampling", as they would call it, has been behind most of success stories in the industry. Musicians “samples" old songs and try to see if they could work with it and call it theirs. Their reason for sampling is that they love that part they want to sample in the old songs and so, they would look for ways to make it part of their own music. However, in order not to be a “flop" in the industry, the musician has to be careful with the way he/she samples. He/she wouldn't want a situation where his/her song sounds embarrassingly similar to another person's song. They would then “layer" the sample as much as they can so as to exude some air of originality.

Some other industries are of the thinking that no one has the intellectual copyright to a product, thus, imitation is totally acceptable. In the fashion industry, the only thing that is not to be copied is the brand, anything else could be modified, copied, altered a little and termed a different product. Although, some regulations have been put in place to curb total plagiarism, they are only limited to the copyrights protection of any two-dimensional representation of the inventor, anything three-dimensional could be imitated and copied without penalties. Fashion designers are now becoming uncomfortable with the fact that their products could be copied without permission, this has prompted them to make their own products “copy proof", they add things to their product that makes it very hard to imitate.

In technology, imitation also has its place, new technologies have been imitated and those imitations have been branded as “original". For instance, Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Inc. announced in 2007 a new technology his company had invented for the new iPhone devices - multi-touch capabilities -. This technology would later take the mobile phone industry to another level, but, rather surprisingly, the same technology had been invented a year ago by an unpopular scientist!

It has been observed that the issue of imitation is a normal thing unless you are the one being imitated. Steve Jobs once said in 1997 that “good artists copy, great artists steal", one would then find it rather amusing that this personalty, who could have said such thing, had practically gone berserk when he discovered a rival company is rising up against him using his very own ideas!

In conclusion, I think the idea of imitation is an integral part of human civilization. In early times, we used tools to create things;using stones to sharpen stones, and some other things. We all should learn how right to imitate from others, failure to do so could cause havoc in the society. In recent times, the issues of piracy has been a major issue and I think it's borne our of senseless imitation of the original product. We all can't go wrong if take cues from others, improve on it, and make it suit our standards. That, I say, is original.

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