Tuesday, June 19, 2007

A Quick Commercial Interruption...

I realize that I never explained the difference between infringement and plagiarism. Until more recently, I sort of used to get the two confused myself. Both of them involve not asking permission to use another person's work (in essence, "stealing") but one of them has an even higher level of dishonesty attached to it.

Infringement is when a person reproduces another's copyrighted works without asking permission. The person using the copyrighted work, however, does not purport to own or have created the work.

Plagiarism, a problem that seems to plague academic communities, is when a person reproduces another's works (copyrighted or not) without asking permission, but the person then passes the work off as his or her own. So all those kids who copy-paste passages directly from books into their term papers without properly citing them are plagiarizing. It's like a glorified term for cheating or copying.

Okay, back to your regularly scheduled CopyRighteous.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would be interested in reading about the penalties for infringement and plagarism. On high school and lower levels, I'd assume it is kinda self-policed by the school and publishers/authors aren't very concerned. On higher academic levels, is it more of a problem? Who actually cares and who is doing the actual enforcement and/or investigating?

(If this is way outta your assignment, no biggie. You may touch on it later.) I love your 'Mo Money 'Mo Porblems reference! : )

Raquel said...

I'm definitely planning to go into what the penalties are for infringement versus plagiarism in a later entry, so stay tuned! Thanks for bringing it up; it's definitely something I need to address in a future entry.