February 3, 2005
posted by Colleen Shirazi at
4:37 PM (Pacific)
You know something...I never actually knew what was plagiarism, until recently.
I decided to look it up...what exactly is plagiarism?
Grammar
plagiarism
Literary theft. Plagiarism occurs when a writer duplicates another writer's language or ideas and then calls the work his or her own. Copyright laws protect writers' words as their legal property. To avoid the charge of plagiarism, writers take care to credit those from whom they borrow and quote.
Similar theft in music or other arts is also called plagiarism.
Lexicon
The noun plagiarism has 2 meanings:
Meaning #1: a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work
Meaning #2: the act of plagiarizing; taking someone's words or ideas as if they were your own
Synonyms: plagiarization, plagiarisation, piracy
Wikipedia
plagiarism
Plagiarism refers to the use of another's ideas, information, language, or writing, when done without proper acknowledgment of the original source. Plagiarism is not necessarily the same as copyright infringement, which occurs when one violates copyright law. Like most terms from the area of intellectual property, plagiarism is a concept of the modern age and not really applicable to medieval or ancient works.
Definition
There is some difference of opinion over how much credit must be given when preparing a newspaper article or historical account. Generally, reference is made to original source material as much as possible, and writers avoid taking credit for others' work.
The use of mere facts, rather than works of creative expression, does not constitute plagiarism. It does not matter whether the facts come from public domain or copyrighted works. In fact, the issue of public domain works versus copyrighted works is irrelevant to the concept of plagiarism. For instance, it is legal for a student to copy several paragraphs (or even pages) of text from a public domain book, such as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and then directly add these quotations to his or her own paper. However if these quotations were not clearly identified as to his or her source, then the student would be guilty of plagiarism, using another writer's work as if it were his or her own. High schools, colleges and universities are especially sensitive to this kind of academic dishonesty, as many students claim that if an action is legal, it must be ethical. This is untrue. Most such institutions have academic codes of ethics which prohibit all forms of plagiarism, whether the idea is plagiarized from public domain or copyrighted sources.
Similarly, it is plagiarism to steal the specifics of someone else's novel idea, and then present it as one's own work. This type of plagiarism is rampant in high schools, colleges and universities, when students illicitly use the analyses in "Cliffs Notes", and falsely present them as being their own original analysis. A small market has emerged of web sites offering essays and papers for sale to students, while a counter-industry has developed of companies offering services for instructors to compare student's papers to a database of sources and search for potential plagiarism.
According to some academic ethics codes and criminal laws, a complaint of plagiarism may be initiated or proven by any person. The person originating the complaint need not be the owner of the plagiarized content, nor need there be any active or passive communication from a content owner directing that any investigation or discipline process be initiated in response to the plagiarism.
It is not plagiarism when two (or more) people independently come up with the same idea or analysis.
There is also accidental plagiarism. One case involved a boy whose mother had repeatedly read to him a story as a very small child. Later in life he was writing a story for an assignment, and a story 'came to him', but the story turned out to be exactly that which his mother had read to him as a small child, though he had no recollection of her reading it to him.
...
It seems that the common thread in these definitions is crediting the source of your information, much more than what kind of information it is or where it came from.
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