Beyonce's "Inspirations" Being Questioned

Today, I ran across an article on the New York Times web site discussing plagiarism found in Beyonce's music videos.

According to the article, Beyonce's video "Countdown", takes dance moves as well as backdrop and style ideas from Belgian choreographer, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Keersmaeker says that she admires Beyonce's dancing and artistic abilities, but found it rude not to recognize where the ideas came from. 


Beyonce's reply to these allegations was that she found Keersmaeker along with others (60's and 70's famous people) as inspirations for this video.  


If we break this article up by viewing the claims, grounds, and warrants of the Toulmin Model, we will see that the claim is directed to the plagiarism found in Beyonce's music video. This claim was brought to the light by Keersmaeker. To support or give grounds to this claim, the article touched on the reader's/veiwer's sensory details by incorporating a video that shows the scenes that matched from Beyonce's video to the dance moves choreographed by Keersmaeker. The article also gave an ethos reasoning by quoting Keersmaeker in the article.


The warrant in this article was obvious with the focus on plagiarism. The word plagiarism has been drilled into our heads since we started writing papers in grade school. In other words, the article reaches our moral values. We know it is wrong to plagiarize, therefore we think that Beyonce has some people that she needs to give credit to in the making of her music video.