Plagiarism

[Chuck]

This has been happening quite a bit here lately and we need to get a handle on it before I start getting letters again.

If you quote and article or paste and article from another site or source you MUST quote that source. There is a plagiarism police and they do spider this site.

Please take a moment and read from this site and learn what you need to do to protect yourself from plagiarism. http://www.plagiarism.org/

In the future I will not edit posts to fix the source I will just delete them.

Simple rule is not to post from emails you receive even if it is a news letter you subscribe to without posting the source of the information.

Thanks
Chuck

[Jeremy]

Actually, just posting the source isn't enough in most cases. You can't, for example, copy an entire article from USAToday, post a link to them, and expect it not to be copyright infringement.

The rule of thumb for "fair use" is...

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The first two probably don't matter much here, but the last two could in some cases. An example of #3 would be copying an entire article from the Ledger Independent without expressed permission. An example of #4 would be posting the work of a local artist or photographer without permission.

A short snippet and link to copyrighted work would be an example of proper fair use.

Some sources actually do allow you to rip them off as long as you give them credit, but you need to be certain that is what they are allowing you to do. Generally, these sources provide a link to the license they're allowing you to rip them off under. For example, the GNU Free Documentation License or the Creative Commons License. Wikipedia allows you to do whatever you want with their content (GFDL) and some bloggers (like myself) encourage people to rip them off in exchange for a link back to them. That's pretty much what the Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org) License is about.

[Chuck]

Thanks Jeremy, I agree. I just wanted to get something up and didn't have time for detail. Your addition saved me some typing.

[Jeremy]

Glad to help :) I'm a huge supporter of the Creative Commons www.creativecommons.org They have tons of stuff provided by ordinary artists, writers, etc. available, most of it's fair use.

[TheMan]

What if it starts... "Dear Hustler, You'll never what happened to me this weekend."?

[ronlrigg]

As a practicable matter if a person is not profiting from it it would be unlikely someone would have any problems because of it.
rr

[Jeremy]

As a practicable matter if a person is not profiting from it it would be unlikely someone would have any problems because of it.
rr

Except in the situation where posting it could lessen the profits made by the creator (See #4). Widespread example would be posting MP3s to the web. Even if you're not selling the MP3, it lessens the ability of the recording label to sell them at iTunes. A local example would be posting an entire article by the Ledger. Even if you're not doing it maliciously and aren't trying to make any money off it yourself, it lessens the ability for them to charge advertising on their own site, because readers don't have to go there to read it. The right way would be to post your thoughts about the article, and link to them. That way everyone benefits (fair use). Back when you could only access older articles at the NY Times by paying a subscription fee, they suffered monetary loss by people copying the article to forum systems. If you knew the title of the article, you could just do an exact search at Google and never have to pay the subscription fees.