See where plagarism gets you?

I am copy-editing the paper, as it my wont on Saturday mornings. There's always something surprising in there—an illuminating jewel amongst the wholesale plagarizing from Wikipedia, conflicted sentance structure, and page-long quotations—that makes my day.

Today's gem: an open letter to the Georgian President from one Otar Dolidze, an aggreived businessman. Dolidze describes how he was robbed of his intellectual property rights and 30 million USD worth of slag-processing machinary. He asks the government to more strenuously protect private property rights and to revise the Georgian Tax Code, which, he says, was plagarized from Germany's.

It was a big misfortune for Georgia when a new tax code was enforced in 1997. The drafter of the code was economist Temur Kopaleishvili, who noted in a personal talk with me that he "copied the law from Germany.” When I asked him whether he copied the law of Germany of 1945 year or modern Germany, he replied with pride: “certainly, from developed Germany.”

I wonder whether this is true. If it is true, how unusual or outrageous would it be for a (then) third-world economy to be modeled after a first-world one? Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is on my reading list. Perhaps I'll have more light in my head after reading it.