[stoney]

It's not okay to plagiarise someone else's thesis paper, because the entire point of a thesis paper is to demonstrate your own ability to think/research/etc. If you plagiarise a paper you can fully expect your university/college/school to reject the paper, and you suffer the consequences.

I don't think the same set of moral constraints apply in Zynga's case. They aren't trying to prove themselves to some 3rd party. The whole point of Zynga is to make money for the people who own and work at Zynga. And apparently duplicating other people's games is working pretty well as a way of meeting that objective. There's definitely nothing noble about what they're doing. And I don't know how much effort they are putting in, but certainly seem to be doing what they are doing (which is distributing games, not producing innovative games) better than everyone else.

[bkirwi]

That's one purpose of a thesis. The more significant purpose -- at least at a graduate level -- is to contribute to the sum of human knowledge. When academics are rewarded based on how many papers they've published in which journals, that's an attempt to quantify the value they've added to the system. Allowing plagiarism prevents assigning proper credit for original work, as well as lowering the total output of the system. Likewise, I think a lot of the outrage comes from the perception that the small developer is providing most of the value, but Zynga is getting most of the profit; not only is this unfair, but it discourages small companies from trying innovative new ideas, and the industry is poorer as a result.

Of course, it's entirely possible that the concept and design of these games is totally interchangeable, and the real value is in the marketing and analytics that Zynga does so well, which shoots that analogy right in the foot.