Degrees of Plagiarism

The Hindu talks about plagiarism, but doesn’t wan’t to do anything about it:

Plagiarism is a nasty word and offence — and literary plagiarists, when caught, tend to be subjected to long-lasting shame. The Oxford English Dictionary offers this working definition: "the wrongful appropriation or purloining, and publication as one's own, of the ideas or the expression of the ideas ... of another ... a purloined idea, design, passage, or work." Tom Lehrer wrote a wonderful mathematician's song about it. The practice apparently being widespread, especially in journalism, academia, and the professions, some writers on the subject speak of degrees of plagiarism. The worldwide spread of the Internet has made plagiarism easier to commit than ever before — and incomparably easier to detect. The defences against the charge of plagiarism are predictable: a photographic or computer-like memory, or the habit of taking notes from many sources and then failing `inadvertently' to acknowledge the sources.

Are they saying that what Gautaman Bhaskaran did was of a lesser degree than that of Kaavya?