Avoid Plagiarism

PLAGIARISM

Excerpt from: "Plagiarism." West's Encyclopedia of American Law. Ed. Shirelle Phelps and Jeffrey Lehman. 2nd ed. Vol. 7. Detroit: Gale, 2005. 454-456. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 16 Jan. 2014.

"Plagiarism is theft of another person's writings or ideas. Generally, it occurs when someone steals expressions from another author's composition and makes them appear to be his own work....

Because copyright law allows a variety of creative works to be registered as the property of their owners, lawsuits alleging plagiarism can be based on the appropriation of any form of writing, music, and visual images.

Plagiarism can take a broad range of forms. At its simplest and most extreme, plagiarism involves putting one's own name on someone else's work; this is commonly seen in schools when a student submits a paper that someone else has written. Schools, colleges, and universities usually have explicit guidelines for reviewing and punishing plagiarism by students and faculty members....

Not every unauthorized taking of another's work constitutes plagiarism. Exceptions are made under copyright law for so-called fair use....

Sometimes the question is one of proper attribution.....

The INTERNET has added a new layer to the question of plagiarism, particularly among high school and college students. In the mid-1990s a number of Web sites cropped up that offered term papers, thesis papers, and dissertations for sale. These "paper mills" make it easy for students to purchase papers instead of writing their own. (The fact that many of the papers being sold are poorly written and minimally researched is apparently of little concern.) A similarly egregious problem results from the wide array of legitimate reports many Web sites make available on the Internet for research purposes. Unscrupulous students with a computer can easily copy large blocks of these reports and paste them into their own papers. Anecdotal evidence suggests that while the ease of copying information has not led to a dramatic increase in plagiarism among honest students, those who have already cheated are likely to make frequent use of electronic resources to continue cheating. Students who use the "copy-and-paste" writing method are being thwarted by instructors who simply type questionable phrases into search engines; if the passage exists in another paper, the search engine will probably find it."