Plagiarism and Copyright piracy on the web

Team 3

Plagiarism:

· To steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own.

· To use another’s production without crediting the source.

· An act of fraud, involving both stealing someone else’s work and lying about it afterwards.

· If you cite your work incorrectly, it is still plagiarism.

Courtesy of: http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/plagiarism

Invisible Revisability:

· The process by which an internet document can be altered, moved or removed entirely from the web with no visible trace of the alteration.

Example:

“There is a serious problem in citing electronic information that seems inescapable, a problem called ‘invisible revisability.’ A citation gives the content and the location of the information at the time of access. Unlike most printed information, electronic information may have been silently modified, moved, or deleted by the time a reader tries to verify the citation. What might be assumed to be the same document as earlier, because it was accessed using the same URL, could be slightly or markedly different. For example, if you had sent e-mail in July 1996 to someone with the message "get h-net jobguide", a position cited on 30 January 1996 would not have been listed, because H-Net constantly updated the guide with more recent listings, usually weekly. (The job guide is no longer distributed by e-mail. If you send such a message today you will get a reply saying the file does not exist.)

Citations might, therefore, on occasion appear to be incorrect through no fault of the researcher. A reader might be hard pressed to distinguish between these innocent cases and cases in which the researcher is careless or even fraudulent in citing. For this reason, you should always give preference in citing to a printed version of the information, because its text is rather fixed and more durable over a period of time. Cite electronic information only when a printed version does not exist or you cannot locate it or use it conveniently.”

Crouse, Maurine. Citing Electronic Information in History Pages. Department of History, University of Memphis. 5 February 2008. http://history.memphis.edu/mcrouse/index.html

How has the web increased the importance of plagiarism?

· The internet has allowed for an exponential increase in plagiarism. Information of any kind can be searched for and acquired in a matter of seconds and it can just as easily be stolen and displayed as one's own.

· Many people are more likely to plagiarize from internet sources because one can simply copy and paste words from a web page directly into a document. Because of this, plagiarism of internet sources is a crime that must be monitored very diligently.

· You can also be getting false information from the web and not even know it, most websites do not cite where they are getting their information. When the work is cited, you are able to trace it backwards and verify if it is substantial.

Who suffers in a case of plagiarism and how?

· The person who originally wrote the text that is being plagiarized suffers from this action. They suffer because the time and effort that they put into creating a unique and thought out document gets unethically stolen by someone who claims the work as his own. Critical ideas and thoughts may be stolen via plagiarism and this can lead to significant losses for the original writer; this can mean both emotional losses as well as monetary losses.

The major consequence of plagiarism is that people who engage in it hurt themselves.  Good research and writing involve a host of skills:  for a start, evaluating sources, taking careful notes, selecting appropriate quotations, paraphrasing, and giving credit to others for their ideas and words.  Students who plagiarize may never learn these skills, and life in college and beyond can be difficult without them.

Of course people who engage in plagiarism also hurt others:  for one, their classmates, and for another, the school or university they attend.  At the very least, turning in plagiarized work is unfair to students who do their own work.  It also jeopardizes the integrity of the grading system.   And whether detected or not, plagiarism violates the implicit contract of the schoolroom:  that students and teachers are working together to help students learn knowledge and skills that will enable them to fulfill their potential.

Courtesy of Baylor School: http://mail.baylorschool.org/~jstover/plagiarism/consequences.htm

 Consequences of plagiarism.
 
· If you are caught plagiarizing, your academic consequences depend on your college’s policy and the degree of how bad it is.
 
· It often results in failure of the assignment, course, and sometimes even expulsion.
 
· Legal fines of 100-50,000+ dollars can be applied.
 
· If you earn more than 2,500 dollars off of it you are looking at 250,000 dollars and up to 10 years and jail.
 
· It may stay on your college or criminal record so it will be hard to apply for another college or job.
 
 
 http://www.ysu.edu/maag/find/FAQ_plag.html