Plagiarism
Key Terms and Concepts: plagiarism, fair use

Plagiarism can be against the law. If a writer publishes a book or article (or music, etc.) and you use it without permission, as if it were your own idea or words, not only are you plagiarizing his work, you are also violating his copyright to that book or article. You can quote something to illustrate a point or to discuss whether the author is right or wrong. This is called Fair Use.

What Do You Think?

• Using a schoolmate's report as your own is not technically a crime. But is it ethical?
  "Help me with my homework."
  I was sick yesterday. Can I copy your notes?
  I just borrowed some ideas.

 
Plagiarism is taking credit for someone else's work - especially their writing.
Many people have been publicly humiliated for this.

Many students have been given an F instead of an A because they copied other people's work and tried to take credit for it.

With great colorful encyclopedias available on CD-ROM, anyone can copy files and include words and pictures and maps In reports. You Will probably not be caught for doing this.

With the Internet, finding massive amounts of information on any subject very easy. All you have to do is copy it, make some minor changes add your name, right? What are the odds your teachers will know about that obscure yet perfect paper you want to use as your own?

This is the problem. How much copying is too much?

Journalists and professional writers use a principle called "Fair Use." This means that you can use pieces of someone's work if you are quoting from it for a review or to build into a report or article. But the key point is that you need to give credit where credit is due. You should name the author, the name of the article/book, and tell when it was written.

But many students take another work and merely add their name to the first page and offer it as their own. Or they may find a really good idea *in their research and use a few paragraphs from another thesis or paper and choose not to name the original author.
 
Plagiarism is a gray area:
it is difficult to define, but easy to recognize.
Teachers now have a way to check if a student's work was plagiarized.
The Web site wwwplagiarism.com is becoming very popular and will make it much easier to catch offenders.
 
Questions To Think About?

You forget entirely about a report that is due on Monday, and there is no way you can complete it over the weekend. Your teacher is unforgiving about being late on assignments. Do you go to the library or the Internet and copy a few bits and pieces from different sources and call it your own to avoid failing? What are the arguments for and against doing this?

If you are going to use someone else's ideas, which is very common for all of us, how many words, sentences or paragraphs of their work is OK to use without giving credit to them?

Is there any sort of plagiarism that you feel is OK? Using the words of the President or other public official?
Would you plagiarize someone else's work/words if you only speak them aloud, but not write them down?

 Plagiarism and the Internet
http://www.plagiarism.org/problem.html

Cut-and-Paste Plagiarism: Preventing, Detecting and Tracking Online Plagiarism
http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~janicke/plagiary.htm

Plagiarism case bedevils Kansas school
http://www.cnn.com/2002/fyi/teachers.ednews/03/19/plagiarism.dispute.ap/index.html