This reminds me of a story from my AI professor in college. Not exactly his words, but it was something like...

"You have to do all of your work on your own. But let's say you decided to copy someone else's homework. Well, to make sure you don't just plagiarize it, you're going to start changing variables and function names, and maybe alter the structure of the code altogether. As it turns out, the more you alter the copy, the more it actually becomes your own work and eventually you would have, in a sense, done the work yourself."