Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the act of presenting the words, ideas, or images of another as your own; it denies authors or creators of content the credit they are due. Whether deliberate or unintentional, plagiarism violates ethical standards in scholarship.

What AI says about Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the act of presenting someone else's ideas, words, or work as your own without proper attribution. It's a form of cheating that involves: copying and pasting from sources, paraphrasing without giving credit, submitting someone else's work as your own, and creating false impressions of your own abilities. Plagiarism can be illegal and result in serious penalties. In Australia, plagiarism can lead to: Up to 5 years imprisonment, a fine of over $600,000 and Civil actions.

To avoid plagiarism, you can:

  • Keep track of the sources you consult in your research
  • Paraphrase or quote from your sources
  • Credit the original author in an in-text citation and in your reference list
  • Use a plagiarism checker before you submit
  • Use a paraphrasing tool and add your own ideas
  • Develop correct acknowledgement or referencing skills

Your lecturers will explain the standards that are appropriate for your area of study. They may also provide tools to help you detect plagiarism, such as plagiarism detector software.

What you can really do about Plagiarism

Forget the AI advice above because there is little that you can do short of preventing copy in the first place. Once they have copied your intellectual property, prosecution will be a time consuming, expensive and a degrading process. Degrading because during the preparation of your case you have to relive the injustice over and over gain, and even if you win a settlement, you will be unlikely to ever get paid. Small time offenders will be hard to locate and the big timers will most likely have a lawyer claiming that because they altered your resource by more than 15-20% then it is no longer the same resource.

Copyright

Copyright is a joke! Original works do not need registration to be protected as your intellectual property. But that is no deterrent and 99% of all people will have no qualms about sharing, duplicating or pirating anything. Why? Because they will claim it as a one-off or such an insignificant crime that no-one will notice.

Copyleft

Now here is the root of the problem! Copyleft is a legal technique that allows users to freely modify, distribute, and share copyrighted works, but only if the same rights are granted to derivative works. Copyleft licenses are often used for software packages, but can be applied to any work, including documents, art, and scientific discoveries.

Copyleft is a social movement that rejects secrecy and centralized control of creative work in favor of decentralization, transparency, and unrestricted sharing of information.

But put more bluntly, Copyleft is commonly supported by those who have absolutely no respect for anything but themselves and what they can get for free. Amongst that crowd you will find:

  • Those who demand to be paid more but refuse to acknowledge that by selling product that their employer might have a hope of recouping those costs.
  • Virtually every employee who thinks that their weekly payout is a legal right regardless of input.
  • Most students under the influence of teachers who have never worked in industry and have no idea of what it is like to venture into enterprise.
  • All other enemies of democracy and free enterprise... all of those bent on depriving the Western World of any dollar they can.

Is anything safe from plagiarism?

Copyright is a joke and ethics go out the window when it comes to web content and software. Take for example the anti-virus software industry, one that provides softer to protect your comupter and the data stored on it... circa 2012 computer repair shops were inundated with crashed computers and it was discovered the fault was with the anti-virus software. The fix was removing that software because there was a bug in its latest update. But the computers to be repaired were running the top brands of anti-virus software (several) which suggests that they all suffered the same bug in their last update. Now how can this happen unless they are all hacking each other's software to copy the latest fix?

Prevention can be the best cure

By prevention we mean preventing copy in the first instance, or controlling who and how they can access your intellectual property, or marking it in such a way that the offender can be easily identified.

 

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