What is Copyright, Plagiarism, and Fair Use?
Copyright
Copyright is a law that gives you the ownership over the things that you create yourself. This can range from a website to a painting, if you created it, you own it and it is the copyright law itself that assures the ownership. The ownership that copyright law grants comes with several rights that the owner has exclusively. These rights include:
- The right to produce the work.
- To distribute copies.
- To prepare derivative works.
- To perform the work.
- And to display the work publicly.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is simply taking other people's work and claiming that work as your own. This work can include a plethora of things such as words, ideas, images, paintings and many more creations. If something has a copyright on it, a person cannot claim that work as their own. If they do claim the work as their own, this would be a perfect example of plagiarism. A person can use the original creators work, but must give credit to the original creator instead of claiming it as their own. Most cases of plagiarism happen in a school setting with school work. However, plagiarism can happen outside of a school setting and that can lead to a misdeamnor charge and fines. Misdeamnor charges and fines would not happen in the school setting, but the student would get into serious trouble and would be disciplined for his or her actions. There are plenty of ways students can plagiarize one's work. These ways include:
- Handing in an essay that yourself did not write.
- Failing to put a quote in quotation marks.
- Giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation.
- Copying sentence structure, but changing words around, without giving credit.
- Self-plagiarising.
Fair Use
Fair use is a legal concept that allows the reproduction of copyrighted material for certain purposes without obtaining permission and without paying a fee or royalty. Purposes permitting the application of fair use generally include review, news reporting, teaching, or scholarly research. The idea of fair use originally arose for written works. But with the advent of digital technology and the Internet, fair use has sometimes been applied to the redistribution of musical works, photographs, videos, and computer programs. Many people do not know what fair use exactly is, but the average person sees some sort of fair use in their daily lives. When people go to the movies and see previews of other movies, they will see an FBI Warning (pictured above) that states, "Federal law allows citizens to reproduce, distribute, or exhibit portions of copyrighted motion pictures, video tapes, or video discs under certain circumstances without authorization of the copyright holder. This infringement of copyright is called "Fair Use" and is allowed for purposes of criticism, news reporting, teaching, and parody". Unfortunately, most people completely ignore the FBI Warning which could lead to major confusion. Anyone in doubt about whether a given activity constitutes fair use of a copyrighted work should consult an attorney. However, it may be faster and simpler to request permission of the copyright owner.