NEW YORK — "When you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research." That was the wisdom of Wilson Mizner, a turn-of-the-century dramatist and sometime prospector.

Some 2,000 years earlier, the Roman playwright Terence put it this way: \o7 Nullum est iam dictum quod non sit dictum prius,\f7 or, "Nothing is said nowadays that has not been said before."

Which is to say the problem of plagiarism is not new. But it is getting renewed attention nowadays--in part for reasons that neither Mizner nor Terence could have anticipated.

Writers today can easily see what many others have written on a subject by searching databases: vast, computer-stored archives of published material.

Many fields are affected and, lately, the media have been in the hot seat.

"I see enormous amounts of material lifted from other sources," said Everette Dennis, executive director of the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University, who has been a victim himself.

Dennis says a bad old situation has become slightly worse because the databases allow easy access to vast amounts of material that previously was very difficult to find.

On July 29, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram columnist fired a columnist for "substantial duplication" of a Washington Post story.

In the same month, scandals over who didn't get credit rattled Japan's Kyodo News Service, the Washington Post, the Boston University communication school, the New York Times and a Stanford University lecturer whose book failed to credit excerpts taken from a magazine article.

Roger Zissu, a Manhattan attorney and copyright expert, notes that plagiarism can occur in music, movies, literature, art, academic papers--even who gets credit for computer software programs.

A woman is suing rock musician Lenny Kravitz, claiming that she, not he, wrote most of the lyrics to Madonna's hit song, "Justify My Love." Last month, a jury found that the musical theme of television's "Winds of War" miniseries was stolen from a song written by a history professor; the verdict was being appealed.

Last spring, an esteemed Abraham Lincoln biographer, backed by 22 peers, vehemently denied that he had plagiarized an earlier work and said his own book drew on a "common body of knowledge in the public domain."

The long list of cases doesn't include the many legal and moral gray areas of plagiarism--some of which are considered socially acceptable.