I often encounter disregard for copyright not only in students’ projects, term or graduation papers, but also beyond classroom. When I hear a popular song in a café, I always wonder: have the owners of this café asked the musicians, or their legal representatives, for permission to use their music for commercial purposes. Why exactly would this use be commercial? Because the music also affects the income of this café: music attracts customers. If it didn't, there would be no music in cafés. But it does. Visitors, who order just tea and sip it for an hour or so, can have come here to listen and relax, not to eat. Here is another case. Some artists don’t like to compose music, but can play it. They take someone else’s songs and do a concert, singing them. Or release an entire album of covers. Both the café owners and the music artists get paid for their work. But what about those who created the original and whose work was used without asking? Do creators deserve to get paid if their art brings income to somebody else? I hope you agree with me that they do.

How do I know that LEGO has produced 650 billion bricks? When I was writing an introduction to this section, I decided to surprise you with the enormity of this number. So, I typed "how many bricks LEGO produced" in the search bar, opened the first link, which, of course, was a Wikipedia article and found a quote from the "Time" magazine. Its article, published in 2008, stated: "Since then, the company has made a staggering 400 billion Lego elements." (Note that this is a quote from the original text, so I put it in quotation marks. The full text of the article is here.) However, since 2008 this number should have increased, so I opened the next link from the search: a post in the blog of the tour operator "Jazz Tour", entitled “EVERYTHING you wanted to know about LEGO”. The post is dated 2014, and it states that the number is 650 billion. However, the source from which the author took this information (and all other information on LEGO) is not specified. Here is another source, which says that there are actually 485 billion bricks ever produced. But here it is again 650 billion in total. Next is a 2018 BBC article that states: LEGO sells 75 billion bricks a year. Turns out, if we trust the "Time" until 2008 and then consider the information from BBC, since 2008 LEGO should have produced 75*11=825 billion (I'm doint the calculation in 2019), which in total gives 400+825=1,225 billion. Well, what a complicated story.. By the way, the mentioned BBC article says that LEGO has problems due to an excessive number of produced pieces: the old models aren’t selling, as customers are used to constant appearance of new products. I would expect BBC to give the exact number of the bricks produced, but it's not there, even in the paragraph "LEGO in numbers"! Which makes me think that LEGO hides the true state of affairs at its warehouses and production lines, so as not to influence the investers’ opinion about the company.

This is how facts become factoids: when reliable sources have left something unsaid, unreliable sources filled in the blanks. Thus, when I said earlier about 650 billions LEGO bricks I most likely retold a factoid - something that looks like a fact, but is very hard to prove and comes from sources with a doubtful reputation or no reputation at all. Although, if we open the first few links shown by the search engine, it seems like a fact for a while. As more and more mismatches appear, it becomes clear that many sources just copy-paste information without checking it. Well-known journals and magazines, publishers with a reputation of professionals can be considered reliable sources. They do make mistakes, hide and gloss over the facts sometimes, because people err, but they work on their mistakes and are very protective of their reputation. In this whole LEGO story, the Time and BBC serve as reliable sources, and blogs and social media posts from little-known authors and non-official representatives are not recommended to rely on. There are, of course, famous bloggers whose posts can be trusted in certain matters. For example, the blog of the writer Boris Akunin is considered to be a reliable source on many history topics. But even in this blog, as its genre is quite informal compared to news portals and scientific journals, the originals and primary sources are not always mentioned, or not fully specified. Therefore, you have more chances to generate a new factoid by referring to blogs.

Let’s sum up:

1. Factoids should be avoided. By retelling someone else's mistake in your text and presenting it as a fact, you spread misleading information.

2. Facts must be taken from reliable publications. Major official publications (scientific, journalistic, documentary and legal) are considered reliable.

3. For all the facts you mentioned that you did not personally witness (even if they are popular facts like Shakespeare's birthday), you must specify a reliable source. If there are several facts and the source is the same, you can specify once that everything related to this topic is taken from this source.

4. All other people’s words, that make up a sequence of three or more words (if it is not a term), should be placed in quotation marks or formatted so that the text differs from your own words. You need to explain to the reader (to make it clear) that the text with this format is someone else's text, not written by you.

5. The original source of all others' texts should be specified near these texts. In science and law, there are very strict rules how to do it.

There are quite a few different ways to explain to people what they can and cannot do with content. The most common one is the copyright symbol. In Russia, its use is regulated by GOST (Governmental standard of the Russian Federation). GOST standards, in fact, regulate a lot of important processes. For example, manufacturers cannot put moths in food, all thanks to GOSTs. And thanks to GOST R 7.0.1-2003, in Russia we know that the symbol © followed by the author's name and the year of creation/publication means that this "work of science, literature and art, which is the result of creative activity, regardless of the purpose and dignity of the work, the way it is expressed, existing in any objective form" can not be copied and modified without permission. Most often, for texts, this means that you can not quote more than one sentence, even if you are doing it for non-commercial purposes. Consider that you study modern literature and your thesis, which contains extracts from Joanne Rowling's novel, will be posted on the university website. The readers should not end up reading the whole novel from your thesis. In the case of movies and computer games, this means a ban on episodes and evem screenshots without consent of the copyright holder. This consent is specified, for example, in the license for a movie or game: you just have to read the license however boring it can be. If a long period of time has passed since the author's death, then the copyright for his or her works ceases to apply. This period varies in different countries, but most often it is 50-70 years. There is a map on Wikipedia where you can look at the current time frame. By the way, Wikipedia explains how its files can be used under all of its files. After the statute of limitations expires, decent people still indicate the authorship, however, copying and modifying the original is allowed.