Copyright; ‘the exclusice right to make copies, license, and otherwise explot a literary, musical, or artistic work, whether printed, audio, video; etc.:works granted such right by law on or after January 1, 1978, are protected for the lifetime of the author or created and for a period of 50 years after his or her death’.

Copying or printing material from the internet that is copyright, is acceptable, however, the creator of the website must be acknowledged. The person must consider that before making copies of someone else’s work, it is encouraged that people ask permission from the site creator or administrator. Not only does this show that the person appreciates the hard work that the creator has put into creating the site, but also it will save the person from other problems associated with internet copyright to develop later down the track.

Plagiarism is the act of taking somene else’s work and submitting it as your own work. Though many people would consider that copying pages from a hardcopy such as a book to be plagiarism, a large number of people fail to recognise that copying material from the website and submitting that information as their own to be plagiarism. But what about sites that give people links to other sites that may have relevant information? “links” sites often plagiarise the most. These sites contain “links” to pages with relevant material with short descriptions of the site. They often don’t recognise the creator of the sites and they do not pay any royalty to the administrators or creators of these sites. They simply paste these ‘links’ into their own “links” site without giving credit to the site or the creator. In this case, the creators and the administrators of the site feel frustrated that the hundreds of hours of work they put in to create the website have simply ‘gone down the drain’ because another site or person has just stolen their work without their permission.

Clearly, people should be better educated about copyright and what they are allowed to legally print or copy. Furthermore, people should be educated about plagiarism. People should understand that plagiarism is illegal and morally and ethically wrong. Site Creators and Administrators should sue people who steal their work in order to deter others who may be thinking of plagiarising.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Updating “Stopping Internet Plagiarism” Part 2 (plagiarismtoday.com)
• 5 Reasons Google is My Primary Plagiarism Checker (plagiarismtoday.com)
• The Stupidity of Plagiarism (plagiarismtoday.com)
• Following up on the plagiarism (depressionmarathon.blogspot.com)
• Copyright-maximalist judges plagiarize lawblogger in opinion (boingboing.net)
• Why Content Splicing is a Bad Idea (plagiarismtoday.com)
• More plagiarism (depressionmarathon.blogspot.com)
• Five Tips for PR Agencies to Ensure That Their Copy is Original (pamil-visions.net)
• Academic plagiarism case dropped (thejc.com)
• Announcing the New CopyByte.com (plagiarismtoday.com)