An acquaintance who works at a B.C. college tells me she has caught students copying and claiming other people’s work as their own.
“If they just credited the sources, there’d be no problem,” she says. “But they don’t, and they don’t even recognize they’ve broken the law or the college’s code of conduct.”
She says the students are shocked she can tell it’s ripped-off material, and they’re especially shocked when they learn their plagiarism could get them kicked out of school or delay their graduation.
According to the University of Victoria’s information on ethics and plagiarism, many people plagiarize without meaning to. They copy material without maintaining rigorous records of where they obtained it. Or, after spending hours or days working on a paper, they lose the boundaries between what is original work and what should be attributed to others.
And, according to my acquaintance, others actually believe they are not plagiarizing. Some believe that anything published online is public domain — that is, that it belongs to everyone. After all, the web is all about free and open access, right?
Wrong.
Under international and Canadian copyright law, creators needn’t register their work to maintain their rights to determine how, where and when it may be used — their copyrights — and to be recognized as the authors of the works — their moral rights. The act of creating text, poetry, songs, screen plays, photographs, artwork, music and so on automatically confers copyright on the creator, regardless of where, how or even if it is published.
Creators can, of course, transfer their rights to somebody else, as happens when employees sign employment contracts, or when you create an account with, say, Facebook.
Teacher friends tell me they regularly use plagiarism-detecting software to check their students’ papers.
Sometimes, they say, the plagiarism is obvious. Some students, says my acquaintance, don’t even bother to reformat the copied text once they paste it into their papers.
“How can we not notice when it’s a different typeface, different margins or even a different colour from the rest of the text in their paper?”
Of course, if content is published online, copy bots might target it. These software scripts automatically scan web pages and copy material to post elsewhere under somebody else’s name. Sometimes the content is translated into another language.
Anyone who posts original content online needs to be aware that the world is filled not just with misguided content thieves, but with unscrupulous people and companies, too.
For those who believe in the innate goodness of humankind and who want to make their original material available but still maintain rights to it, Creative Commons provides a solution. That’s an online content-licensing system that enables sharing while also asserting varying levels of rights on behalf of content creators.
The most basic licensing level under Creative Commons is attribution. Anyone who downloads original content under an attribution licence agrees to credit the content’s creator whenever, wherever and however the content is used.
Other licensing levels exist, but all Creative Commons licences require attribution.
The Creative Commons website lists a number of organizations that use its system, including Flickr, the online photo-sharing site, the Public Library of Science, which publishes seven science and medical journals, and 1,900 courses by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Open Course Ware system.
Here at home, B.C. Campus is working on a similar model to make 40 open-licensed textbooks available to provincial colleges and universities, and free of charge to students.
Anyone using material from the B.C. Campus texts still has to credit their sources. An open licence means you can use the material — it doesn’t mean you can claim content created by someone else as your own.
Somebody might catch you if you tried.
