[M]usicians do still get in hot water for plagiarism - from other artists and their lawyers, if not the public (Dylan's lifting of musical ideas from long-dead bluesmen might explain why it's never been a big deal for him). George Harrison, Dylan's sometime collaborator, ended up embroiled in decades-long legal proceedings and paid damages of $2m in today's money after he accidentally borrowed the backbone of his song "My Sweet Lord" from "He's So Fine" by The Chiffons. There are similar examples from artists as throwaway as Robin Thicke (for plagiarising Marvin Gaye) or as acclaimed as Radiohead (plagiarising The Hollies) and Lana del Rey (plagiarising that same plagiarised Radiohead song).

So culture is both a freewheeling world where anyone steals anything from anyone - everything is a remix - and it has rules about who can copy what: there's a maddening inconsistency between what counts as plagiarism versus "quotation" or "influence" or "tribute", depending on the context (and let's not even get into the complicated world of musical sampling rights).

This is all rather different from my own field, academia. There's no "folk tradition" in universities, nor any ambiguity: you have to cite your sources, and if you don't you're in big trouble. Not only do professors put major efforts into deterring their students from copying each other's work, they themselves are under major pressure not to plagiarise in their published papers. A glance at the website Retraction Watch will show you that plagiarism frequently causes academic papers to be retracted from the literature, with the authors' reputations ruined. According to the University of Kentucky law professor Brian Frye:

A plagiarist is an academic pariah, a transgressor of the highest law of the profession, the embodiment of the "great deceiver," who leads everyone astray. [...] Plagiarism tarnishes the scholarship itself and leaves it forever suspect. If the purpose of scholarship is dowsing for truth, then the plagiarist is a liar who poisons the well from which everyone draws.

Although many would agree, you might have detected a tinge of sarcastic hyperbole - and indeed, in the quoted paper, Frye makes the contrarian argument that academics should stop caring at all about plagiarism. They shouldn't mind if people use their ideas, or even their exact words, without citing them; rules against plagiarism do the reader no favours and exist merely to shore up the ego of the author. "Academic plagiarism norms", Frye writes, "are primarily an inefficient and illegitimate form of extra-legal academic rent-seeking that should be ignored."