I was reading this article in the Wall Street Journal the other day about people stealing clever lines from someone else’s online dating profile.

“Among the 125 million people in the U.S. who visit online dating and social-networking sites are a growing number of dullards who steal personal profiles, life philosophies, even signature poems. “Dude u like copied my whole myspace,” posts one aggrieved victim.

Copycats use the real-life wit of others to create cut-and-paste personas, hoping to land dates or just look clever.”

Stealing someone else’s idea or work has been around since the beginning of time. You probably only have to look no farther than the adjacent cubicle to find someone that has taken credit for your ideas and reaped the benefits. But, copying and pasting someone’s dating profile really sinks to new lows. How unoriginal a person are you if you can’t think of a few sentences to differentiate yourself? Or, are these people really just being efficient? Is this simply a case of not needing to reinvent the wheel?

As I pondered this article I started to think about how this sort of behavior relates to business on the web. Are there any truly original ideas left, or is everything just derivative of something that’s already been done? Look at YouTube - there was nothing new there in the way of technology, but in the last two years they’ve ingrained web video and user generated content into the mind of millions of people. What made YouTube stand out over something like Google Video?

Is it OK to copy-and-paste someone’s ideas and pass them off as your own? How much needs to be changed, deleted, added, or enhanced before it is considered a new or original work? Does flooding the web with similar products and services help build competition and inspire creativity, or does it just clutter the landscape and make it harder to separate the wheat from the chaff?

I’d love for you to weigh in with your thoughts.