Plagiarism refers to the use of another's ideas, information, language, or writing, when done without proper acknowledgment of the original source. Plagiarism is not necessarily the same as copyright infringement, which occurs when one violates copyright law. Like most terms from the area of intellectual property, plagiarism is a concept of the modern age and not really applicable to medieval or ancient works.
There is some difference of opinion over how much credit must be given when preparing a newspaper article or historical account. Generally, reference is made to original source material as much as possible, and writers avoid taking credit for others' work.
The use of mere facts, rather than works of creative expression, does not constitute plagiarism. It does not matter whether the facts come from public domain or copyrighted works. However, the issue of public domain works versus copyrighted works is irrelevant to the concept of plagiarism. For instance, it is legal for a student to copy several paragraphs (or even pages) of text from a public domain book, such as Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, and then directly add these quotes to his or her own paper. However if these quotes were not clearly identified as to his or her source, then the student would be guilty of plagiarism, using another writer's work as if it were his or her own. High Schools, Colleges and Universities are especially sensitive to this kind of academic dishonesty, as many students claim that if an action is legal, it must be ethical. This is untrue. All high schools, college and universities have academic codes of ethics which prohibit all forms of plagiarism, whether the idea is plagiarized from public domain or copyrighted sources.
Similarly, it is plagiarism to steal the specifics of someone else's novel idea, and then present it as one's own work. This type of plagiarism is rampant in high schools, colleges and universities, when students illicitly use the analyses in "Cliffs Notes", and falsely present them as being their own original analysis. A small market has emerged of web sites offering essays and papers for sale to students, while a counter-industry has developed of companies offering services for instructors to compare student's papers to a database of sources and search for potential plagiarism.
According to some academic ethics codes and criminal laws, a complaint of plagiarism may be initiated or proven by any person. The person originating the complaint need not be the owner of the plagiarized content, nor need there be any active or passive communication from a content owner directing that any investigation or discipline process be initiated in response to the plagiarism.
It is not plagiarism when two (or more) people independently come up with the same idea or analysis.
There is also accidental plagiarism. One case involved a boy whose mother had repeatedly read to him a story as a very small child. Later in life he was writing a story for an assignment, and a story 'came to him', but the story turned out to be exactly that which his mother had read to him as a small child, though he had no recollection of her reading it to him.
Famous examples of plagiarism:
- Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism as a young girl for a school composition. Mortified, she determined to have all future compositions screened by her friends before submission.
- George Harrison was successfully sued for plagiarizing (though perhaps unconsciously) the Chiffons' "He's So Fine" for the melody of his own "My Sweet Lord".[1]
- Senator Joseph Biden was forced to withdraw from the 1988 Democratic Presidential nominations when it was revealed he had failed a course in law school due to plagiarism. It was also shown that he had plagiarised several campaign speeches, notably those of British Labour leader Neil Kinnock and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.[2]
- Popular historian Stephen Ambrose has been criticized for incorporating passages from the works of other authors into many of his books.
- Psychology professor René Diekstra, also well-known as author of popular books, left Leiden University in 1997 after accusations of plagiarism. Procedures are on-going in 2003, in which Diekstra fights a report about him on this matter.
- Alex Haley was permitted to settle out-of-court for $650,000, having admitted that he copied large passages of his novel Roots from The African by Harold Courlander.
- Martin Luther King, Jr. plagiarized his doctoral thesis and other works
- Eres tu, Spanish song at the Eurovision Song Contest 1973 was a plagiarism of Slovenian (then Yugoslav) song from ESC 1966 (Berta Ambrož: Brez Besed) but due to political reasons (Cold War) it wasn't disqualified.
Plagiarism and the Internet
The widespread use of the Internet has increased the incidence of plagiarism. Students are able to use search engines to locate information on a wide range of topics. Once located, this information can be cut-and-pasted into their own documents. The size of the Internet makes it difficult for teachers to trace the source of plagiarised material.
There are also websites which provide complete essays for students to download. These websites provide a database of subject-specific topics; some provide custom-made essays on any topic (for a fee).
However, the Internet can also be used to combat plagiarism. Teachers can use search engines to search for parts of suspicious essays; some websites provide a service to check essays for plagiarised material, such as TurnItIn, a service used to analyze student papers against the millions of online sources for similarities and prepare a report for the teacher to review and determine the extent of plagiarism, if any. But despite these services, empirical evidence suggests that the overall effect of the Internet is to increase plagiarism.
Maxim
It is sometimes said that "Copying from one source is plagiarism, copying from several sources is research".