Copyright & Plagiarism - Big Brother Is Watching

I was recently sent an e-mail with a link to this article, written for The New York Times by Dan Frosch. The article chronicles the law suit that Righthaven (a company who’s sole purpose is to stop online “copyright infringement of news articles originally published in the Las Vegas Review Journal and Denver Post”) pursued against Brian Hill for posting a copyrighted image that belonged to the Denver Post on his blog.

The article explains the shock the Mr. Hill experienced by the suit, and in all honesty, I probably would have been a tad surprised myself had this happened to me. But, the sole difference is… I know better! And this got me thinking: how can I better prepare my students for situations such as this?

I have the privilege of teaching 3 sections of an Information Literacy course for the college where I am employed. In this course, students learn the entire research process from start to finish, including in the middle a section on APA style and plagiarism. We touch very briefly on copyright and how to properly find images online through the creative commons, but I still don’t think it hits home for students. They understand that plagiarism is wrong, but they still don’t fully understand the consequences. To be honest, even though my college has a plagiarism and academic integrity policy, most instructors (and maybe that’s too general to say) aren’t cross-referencing work to fully determine if the work being turned in is original and properly cited. Reasons why include:

* It’s so much easier to just let it be.
* It’s hard work and time consuming to play the copyright police.
* Maybe the instructors don’t know any better…

My role as a librarian is not to be the campus copyright police, but I’m beginning to think that someone’s gotta do it! Plagiarism is still a big issue for any college campus, even with tools like TurnItIn (it takes instructors being proactive and actually using the tools available to them). We’ve seen a doctoral thesis intentionally plagiarized, “artists” such as Lady Gaga potentially being sued for theft, and Apple suing Samsung for design theft. In reality, students just don’t know that in the heat of the moment…copying and pasting is never ok!

This quarter, I am going to make a more concerted effort to get the point across that plagiarism could potentially land you in a heap of trouble, both legally and educationally. In my class…big brother is watching!


**Updated**
There is also a fantastic video on Copyright On Campus. And, a classroom presentation that I've been working on, along with the Assistant Librarian where I work, will be posted soon.