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3.2: Intellectual Property and Plagiarism

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    Copyright and Intellectual Property

    First, know that we are not lawyers and that the following discussions concerning intellectual property are admittedly limited in scope. The primary focus here is what’s best to consider from a student perspective, whether you’re making decisions about how to effectively cite a piece of evidence you’re using in an argument or otherwise planning to create something new with someone else’s work.

    Now, let’s get started with intellectual property and plagiarism.

    If you live in any of the countries signatory to the 1886 Berne Convention (Links to an external site.), then you automatically own the exclusive copyright of whatever original work you produce. In this context, you produce a “work” whenever you manifest an idea in some physical form, and the legal rights to copy and distribute that work are yours. This is part of “intellectual property,” the concept that ideas (and the things that we create in order to express these ideas) can be owned by one person or another.

    Let’s step back for a second and consider the first part of that last paragraph. You automatically own it. That’s right, you don’t have to register with a copyright office or even put that little circle-C symbol on your work; as soon as you scribble that sad little poem on a cocktail napkin, it’s legally yours to do with what you want. This also applies to musical compositions/recordings, videos, visual art, so don’t think that we’re just talking about words here. As soon as you produce the material, as long as you aren’t stealing directly from someone else, you own it.

    Now, wait… what do I mean by “stealing directly from someone else?” What, exactly, does that mean? Nobody creates anything that isn’t in some way based off of work that produced before them. Shakespeare borrowed stories from history and mythology and rewrote them…

    Plagiarism may be considered unethical because it is:

    • the theft of someone else’s ideas and/or words and
    • the fraudulent presentation of work that is not one’s own.

    We want to avoid plagiarism for several reasons:

    • Our society is based (at least in some significant way) on the communication of ideas through words, whether we’re talking about the Constitution, law, contracts, entertainment, whatever. When we haphazardly copy what others have said, we stunt social and economic growth.
    • Our words are expressions of our unique ideas, and, as we’ve seen, reflect our unique identities as sovereign individuals. When we parrot the words and ideas of others, we detract from own humanity and stunt our intellectual, emotional, and professional growth.
    • Our daily interactions and decisions are often guided by certification in one way or another. For example, when you have a toothache, you go to a dentist rather than a butcher because the dentist has a framed piece of paper on the wall that supposedly proves that she/he has done the necessary work and had the necessary practice to be trusted with your teeth.  Next time you’re at the dentist and they’ve got that little sharp hook thingie jabbing into your gums, look up at the wall and ask yourself, “They didn’t cheat their way through college, did they?” Hopefully that illustrates how plagiarism can reverberate throughout society.
    • Our academic and professional futures can be put at serious risk. Because plagiarism is considered theft, fraud, and cheating, there are any number of potential consequences for it:
      • failure of an assignment
      • failure of a course
      • expulsion from school
      • public humiliation
      • discredit to name
      • loss of a job or position
      • subject to lawsuit
      • deep feeling of shame and/or worthlessness

    I’m not trying to scare you, but we need to get things straight. Here is the main idea for avoiding plagiarism: Whenever you get an idea or a word from a particular source, be prepared to indicate exactly what you got from where. You do this through consciously meticulous and ethical interaction with the work of others.

    Defining Plagiarism

    When someone infringes upon another’s intellectual property rights in such a way that it constitutes theft and fraud, it’s often referred to as “plagiarism.”

    What Counts as Plagiarism?

    We typically think of plagiarism as cheating. Plagiarism, however, often occurs because the process of citation can be confusing, technology makes copy + paste so easy, and knowing exactly what to cite is not always easy! You can avoid plagiarism by learning how to cite material and keeping track of sources in your notes. Give yourself plenty of time to process sources so you don’t plagiarize by mistake. Here are some examples of plagiarism:

    • Submitting a paper written by someone else.
    • Using words and phrases from the source text and patching them together in new sentences.
    • Failing to acknowledge the sources of words or information.
    • Not providing quotation marks around a direct quotation. This leads to the false assumption that the words are your own.
    • Borrowing the idea or opinion of someone else without giving the person credit
    • Restating or paraphrasing a passage without citing the original author
    • Borrowing facts or statistics that are not common knowledge without proper acknowledgment
    Behaviorism_1.gif
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): The plagiarism spectrum. There are many different ways to plagiarize. It is your responsibility to know what constitutes plagiarism so you can avoid it in your assignments.
    Obvious Plagiarism Less Obvious Plagiarism
    • Turning in someone else’s paper as one’s own.
    • Turning in a paper that was bought from a service on the Internet.
    • Reusing a paper previously turned in for one class and then submitting the same paper or portions of it for subsequent classes without permission of the instructor (self-plagiarism).
    • Cutting and pasting entire sections from other authors’ works into one’s own paper.
    • Using another author’s exact words but not putting quotation marks around the quote and citing the work.
    • Failing to differentiate between common knowledge and something that needs to be cited.
    • Failing to include complete and correct citations.
    • Sticking too closely to another author’s words by only changing a few words around when paraphrasing.
    • Using another author’s exact words but not putting quotation marks around the quote even if one cites the work.
    Behaviorism_1.gif
    Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): More ways to plagiarize.

    Intentional Versus Unintentional Plagiarism 

    It can be useful to think about the difference between unintentional and intentional plagiarism. If you get stumped on an assignment, download a paper from a website, and submit it as your own work, you have committed plagiarism. This is an obvious example of intentional plagiarism. You know you didn’t write the paper! You deliberately copied the work from a website and tried to pass it off as your own. Not good! But unintentional plagiarism is much more common and in many ways equally problematic. If you got stumped on an assignment, downloaded a paper from a website, and then tried to rewrite that paper in your own words, without giving proper credit to the website, you still have committed plagiarism, even your intent was to write your own paper. In this second example, the plagiarism may be unintentional. There’s nothing wrong with research or using websites to advance your thinking. You must, however, give proper credit to any sources you consult, including using quotations for any words that are not your own and crediting any ideas that come from elsewhere.

    Why Should You Care?

    Being honest and maintaining integrity in your academic work is a sign of character and professionalism. In addition to maximizing your own learning and taking ownership of your academic success, not plagiarizing is important because

    • Your professors assign research projects to help you learn. You cheat yourself when you substitute someone else’s work for your own.
    • You don’t like it when someone else takes credit for your ideas, so don’t do it to someone else.
    • Plagiarizing comes with consequences. Depending on the offense and the institution, you may be asked to rewrite plagiarized work, receive a failing grade on the assignment, fail the entire course, or be suspended from the university.
    • Professors use search engines, databases, and specialized software to check suspicious work, so you will eventually get caught.

    Watch it:

    The following video demonstrates the practical importance of always giving credit where credit is due.

    You can view the transcript for “Just Because You Put It In Your Own Words…” here (opens in new window).

    Citing Common Knowledge and Facts

    If you cite information that is common knowledge or a fact, you do not need to cite that information. Everyone would agree that the Civil War started in 1861. You don’t need a citation for that information, even if you didn’t know when the Civil War started until you looked it up! Be careful, however—if there is any controversy or complexity to the information you get from elsewhere, you want to include a source. So, for example, if you are discussing the causes of the Civil War, you probably want to cite your sources, since historians might disagree about the various causes.

    Think about it this way. A reader might challenge you about something in your paper, and in that case, you want a source. No reader is going to challenge you about when the Civil War began. That’s a fact—so you don’t need a source. But if you claim that the Civil War was a conflict over federalism versus states’ rights, a reader might disagree and cite instead the centrality of slavery as a cause for the war. In this case, you would want to be able to offer your source—the expert whose opinion about the cause of the Civil War you have cited. Your reader’s argument, then, is with that source and not with you.

    Behaviorism_1.gif
    Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\)

    Avoiding Plagiarism

    Behaviorism_1.gif
    Figure \(\PageIndex{4}\)

    Licenses and Attributions

    “Defining Plagiarism”

    CC LICENSED CONTENT, ORIGINAL

    CC LICENSED CONTENT, SHARED PREVIOUSLY

    Source Information:

    Using Research to Support Scholarly Writing- A Critical Thinking and Research Methodology Sandbox for First year Composition (Bloom, et. al.)

    3.2: Intellectual Property and Plagiarism is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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