Really? From Wikipedia?

Michel Houellebecq, the popular and controversial French novelist, has won his country’s top literary honor, the Prix Goncourt, for his most recent work The Map and the Territory. Houellebecq is extremely popular outside of his own country for his dark novels depicting the horrors of freedom in modern, liberal democratic society. He’s also famous for his stridently anti-Islamic remarks. The new novel, according to The Guardian:

features a reclusive, misanthropic artist, and a handful of actual French media celebrities, including author Houellebecq, an alcoholic with poor personal hygiene. The novel revolves around the investigation into Houellebecq's sadistic murder: the unfortunate man is decapitated.

And while that lil' plot summary is all well and good, the novel brings up issues that are even more urgent for poets and writers than decapitation:

The book brought more controversy when it was published by Flammarion in September, with Houellebecq being accused of copying passages verbatim from Wikipedia. The novelist responded that "taking passages word for word was not stealing so long as the motives were to recycle them for artistic purposes", citing the influence of Georges Perec amongst others.

Taken alongside David Shields’s Reality Hunger (and alongside, you know, YouTube, and all of popular music) it seems like the concept of artistic plagiarism is becoming more “mainstream” (whatever that means). Many novelists and poets use the internet for research purposes anyway, so what happens when they decide to take the research they’ve found, and incorporate it wholesale?