Where do ideas come from? Are they plucked from the ether by luck or are they gifted by Calliope (the muse of musicians, playwrites etc). Most people agree that ideas come from a well spring, a well that is tapped frequently and altered.
It's so funny that my view on what it means to be creative is so frightened of copying. There's so many ways that what one person sees as plagiarism is actually a collaboration, It is quite silly that a person thinks they have a unique creative voice or that your authorship is that protected. All creative thought is about interpreting things and being influenced by what has gone before, with or without realising it. If you miss that you miss a lot, for example the covers of songs can far surpass the original; Jimi Hendrix's All Along The Watchtower, The Man Who Sold The World by Nirvana or the piano interpretation by Maxence Cyrin of the Pixies classic Where Is My Mind. However it is important to make sure that you credit those you borrow from. Recently there have been lots of high profile lawsuits between people over sampling music and more importantly companies over technology that is built on the shoulder of giants. So what does this mean?
It means we lose out on wonderful work like Danger Mouse's Jay-Z/ Beatles mash-up The Grey Album and astonishing Music Video mash-ups that litter YouTube with creative panache and flair (as well as the dire Naruto fights mixed to Evanescence, Linkin Park or Nickelback and that song 'Hero' which was originally used for Spiderman 2.
What we are ending up with is more litigation and less social evolution, which aims to promote the betterment of society and peoples through the benefits which development brings. We don't need issues like that hedge fund guy buying a pharmaceutical company which has created an AIDs drug and jacking up the price- the guy who created the vaccine for Polio (Jonas Salk) and gave it to the world for free. Some things are too important for the worlds and society as a whole to turn a profit from.

As a teacher I want my pupils to be creative and experiment with tools, ideas and applications- build on the shoulders of giants if you will. The locked-in infrastructure of a lot of modern technology is preventing this from happening so something needs to change.