The other day I was following this thread:

Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware [video] (2016) (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13605599

I'm reproducing a part of a comment from there:

> One could say the evolutionary process is based on this principle.

> Copy. Paste. Improve. Repeat.

What have I just done? In no way am I supporting or suggesting that plagiarism or content theft is a model to follow, but I do believe that people learn from what others do and build on that.