Copy or Creation?

Do you know something that makes us superior from machines and computers? The ability to connect information, concepts, to tie them together in order to compare them and to come up with a brand new analysis out of it. The brain is great! I don't think any machine could make the links we make between all the information that we digest everyday. But is this ability a source of creation?

Orhan Pamuk keeps repeating in "The Black Book" that nothing that we could say, imagine, or create is virgin from influences of readings, conversations, education. So what is it that makes the difference between an original work and a vulgar plagiarism?

I think is the "added value" that our brain could have produced (sorry if it sounds too economical), this unexpected link between ideas and informations, that piece of thought that makes us think or wonder and that makes us in return produce some more "added value".

In other words, a plagiarism is arid whereas an original work carries the seed that will lead to another original work if it grows in the brain of the one that's reading or listening to us.

This led me to think about a controversy that arose in France this summer after Mazarine Pingeot published a novel about a mother that killed her babies and deep freezed them. Some people think that she just exploited a gruesome piece of news and interfered in the private life of a family. I have not read the book, but apparently Mazarine Pingeot did not base her book only on what happened to that French couple in Korea. And even if she had... if the book is well written, if it carries the original mark of her thoughts about infanticide, then I don't see why she should not be entitled to inspire herself on true facts!