I mostly agree with hilarious's posts. The plagiarism was exactly the same offense as any member of the typical spammer flood, with exactly the same mindset: "I want money -> I need to make x posts with y words to make money -> the easiest way to do that is to copy/paste something from elsewhere", with complete disregard for your own integrity, the health of the forum, the ongoing discussion, or fairness in crediting the actual author. If someone copy/pasted something that was amazingly high-quality and on-topic, I'd understand more (though you'd still get banned), but almost always people copy the first thing that they find on Google. To be so lazy that you won't even make up your own low-quality post, but instead save a few minutes by importing some garbage from the wider Internet, is a massive insult to this forum's community, and is proof that at least in that moment the only thing you cared about was money-making.

I don't believe in a "strict rule of law"; even if it's written somewhere that "copy/paste = permaban", I'm willing to relax that on occasion. If you're going to be a net positive to the forum going forward, then I probably want you here, even if you've made past mistakes. But someone who at any point copy/pastes garbage like this has proven that they have an utterly broken mindset when it comes to the forum, and I have a really hard time believing that such a person will be a net positive going forward.