Copyrights,
Plagiarism
and Intellectual Property
The
main products that derive from university life are documents—texts that convey our ideas, in our own words. We take
pride in our texts and we expect others to respect them.
We also expect others to take pride in their texts. The
notion of a text as a product is captured in the phrase,
intellectual property, There are two sides
to intellectual property and both are considered to be
HUGELY important to all academic workers. One is that
it is imperative that you don't plagiarize, the other
is that you acknowledge copyright.
Plagiarism
The
verb "plagiarize" means to use passages from
someone else's work and present it to others as if it
were your own. If you borrow text from another author and
put it into a term paper as if you wrote it yourself,
without giving credit to the original you are plagiarizing
and you are guilty of academic dishonesty. This is one
of the most serious offenses you can commit in an academic
environment and could lead to your dismissal from the
university. You can, of course, quote others if you cite
them appropriately. If you are quoting a short passage,
you can put it in the body of your text in quotation marks,
with a citation following it. If you are quoting a relatively
long passage from another author, you need to put the
quoted material into a special indented section of your
paper, and put the original author's name next to it,
like this:
One
of the things that really irks me is learning how to
format text to show my readers that I am actually quoting
someone else. These indented paragraphs are a pain in
the derriere. (DA, 2003).
Anytime
you give a written manuscript to anyone in an academic
setting, that person will assume you are the author. If
you are not, and you don't make it clear that you are
not, you are guilty of academic dishonesty. The assumption
is always that your texts represent your own thoughts,
written in your own words. Any passage, however brief,
that you copy from someone else is a passage that has
been plagiarized. Don't ever do that. People around here
care a lot about original thought. If they think you have
duped them they will be angry and hurt and will want to
punish you.
In
fact the university has some pretty strong policies about
plagiarism, which are available here.
Copyright
The
term "copyright" applies when someone has exclusive
rights to a particular text, song or other piece of intellectual
property. If my caretaker writes a brilliant article, and
you want all your students to read it, you need to make
sure she gets a kickback for all those copies you make.
The general rule of thumb is that you are allowed to make
a copy of someone else's work for a single purpose, but
you can't make multiple copies without paying a royalty
for it's use. Hence, you can go to the library and make
individual copies of any articles you wish, but if you
want to make multiple copies, as you would for a class,
you need to provide a royalty to the original author.
If you create a course pack, and take it to a reputable
copying service such as Paper Image, they
will obtain copyright permission for you for each article
in your course pack. If the original publisher charges
a royalty, they will add that cost to the course pack.
For instance, an article from the Educational Researcher
might carry a $.50 royalty. The copy service will add that
$.50 to the cost of the course pack. The price students
pay, therefore, will equal the sum of the printing costs
plus the copyright costs.
The
web creates a real problem for copyrighting because anything
you post on it is effectively available to everyone in
the world. You might want to check out how my human caretaker,
Mary Kennedy, posted her papers on her
web page. She has a separate agreement page for each
paper, asking potential readers to agree that they are
copying the paper only for their own individual purposes.
I frankly don't know if her solution is legal, but it
would definitely NOT be legal if she later decided to
require all her students to read one of those papers,
because then she would be knowingly reprinting multiple
copies of the paper.
Linda
Howe-Steiger and Brian C. Donohue recently published an
article in the EPAA that addresses this issue. If you
are concerned, check
this out.
©
Mary Kennedy, 2006
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