(back by popular demand)
Evidently it's tough for many writers to think up their own stories, so it would stand to follow that it is much, much easier to steal someone else's work and pass it off as your own.
We call this plagiarism. It's illegal, but don't let that stop you.
Here's how it could work in your favor: all you have to do is go back a century or two and pick someone who was a damn good writer, but obscure and not widely read. There are so many authors like that whose fine, award-worthy work has not seen the light of day in God knows how many decades. And in this age of Nintendo DS and PSWhichever, it's not like anyone will ever read that tired old stuff again, except maybe the occasional old lady librarian.
So if you're a young writer of promise, you might steal a big chunk of another, dead writer's work for something like, say, your Ph.D. dissertation, or your big literary award-winning story collection, and probably no one will ever notice, and you can go on to teach at a big university and be awarded fellowships and win things like the Flannery O'Connor Award and you'll never get busted.
Unless you're Brad Vice.
His defense? Let me quote from the article: "I made a mistake concerning the parameters of copyright and fair use."