One way or another, almost every person used the products of someone else's intellectual labor. But someone just took someone’s idea as the basis of their work, and another, without a twinge of conscience, downloaded a couple of articles from the network, based on which a course paper could be obtained in a few hours. Plagiarism is familiar to everyone. But what exactly can be attributed to this concept?
What is plagiarism?
Mankind relies on the experience of previous generations and other people, otherwise there would have been absolutely no progress. But in the process of cognition, it is important not to steal other people's thoughts, even by accident. One of the generally accepted norms of modern international law has become the unconditional belonging of the results of intellectual labor to its creator. But sometimes unscrupulous people appropriate other people's words and ideas, passing them off as their own. This is what plagiarism is.
One of the problems in this area is the proof that the theft of someone else's intellectual property was intentional. According to conventional wisdom, good ideas literally are in the air, there are only seven notes in the musical line, and the laws of physics are the same for everyone. So is it worth it to expose musicians for plagiarism of songs, and poets - for poems echoing rhymes with the works of other creators, if you can just enjoy the results? Perhaps this is a rather complicated dilemma that modern people most often decide in favor of justice.
Plagiarism and compilation
While studying at school and university, many students are faced with their first scientific work. Most often, the task boils down to pulling other people's ideas from different sources, compiling an abstract or term paper from them, which, most likely, no one will even read, pass and get a good grade for it. This is not plagiarism to the fullest; it is a compilation, which, however, differs little from it. And the problem is that most teachers simply turn a blind eye to this. As a result, those who continue their scientific career, and in the future do not hesitate to use such methods. Plagiarism of a dissertation or monograph - alas! - not at all uncommon.
In Western educational institutions, for a job that a student simply downloaded from the Internet or compiled from a couple of articles, without even bothering to retell other people's ideas in his own words, you can seriously pay. After all, the task is to learn how to think independently, and not write the original work. That is why plagiarism is strictly punished.
Identification
So, when it became clear what plagiarism is, it is worth mentioning how the works are analyzed for its presence. The easiest way to understand whether this or that work is “cleaned up” completely is to check for plagiarism. Now this is a very affordable and extremely simple procedure. It helps not only teachers, but also owners of sites ordering articles from copywriters. It is also used in the advertising business and other industries where originality and unsatisfaction are important. Unfortunately, machine checking can be quite easily circumvented by changing the order of words in a sentence or choosing appropriate synonyms, which plagiarism practitioners often use. The abundance of quotes from other works can also confuse the computer, so the last word in this matter always remains with the person.
Criteria for Plagiarism
Borrowing and stealing other people's ideas is the scourge of the information age.It often happens that it is not the author of the original work that won, but the thief who managed to tell about this idea earlier. This gave rise to the need not only to legislatively protect those who generate something new, but also to understand by what criteria it is possible to distinguish citation from plagiarism and just something similar to using the result of someone else's work.
There are special experts who analyze creative works for their similarity and identity, participating in disputes about plagiarism. And they use the following criteria:
- style of the work;
- appropriate conditionality and design of the quote, if any;
- date of publication of each of the controversial works;
- compliance with the civic position and the worldview of the author;
- lack of explicit references to the source of the quote;
- the discrepancy between artistic techniques (scientific methods) and general style.
Of course, in each case, their own methods are applied, but first of all, especially when it comes to a creative work, attention is focused not on the content, but on the form. That is, from the point of view of the legislation on intellectual property, the poem "Borodino" and the corresponding mosaic panorama are completely separate and independent masterpieces.
Legal regulation
International legislation protecting intellectual property represented by the so-called TRIPS Agreement adopted in 1994. In order to avoid sanctions, all countries included in the WTO are forced to comply with it.
As for Russia, national legislation regulating intellectual property issues includes the following:
- Part 4 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation.
- Federal Law No. 5351-I (last revised on July 20, 2004).
- No. 149-FZ of July 27, 2006.
Punishment
What is plagiarism if not theft? So many people think, although the thief is not interested in material values, but in the results of someone else's mental work, and therefore they believe that the punishment should be appropriate.
If we are talking about a written project in the process of study, the consequence may be a refusal to count the work and the inability to transfer the student to the next course. There are also frequent cases of exclusion from the university of a person who does not want to accept these rules.
As for the cases when the theft was carried out in order to derive profit from it, then it will not work to get rid of public censure. If the plagiarism check reveals the guilt of the suspect, depending on the damage caused, he will be forced to pay a fine or even go to jail.
In world practice, it is believed that the most effective measure against the theft of intellectual property is compensation for non-pecuniary damage, the amount of which can be a huge number of zeros. There are no such precedents in Russia, but who knows what will happen next?
Copyright and its criticism
Current international legislation relating to the protection of intellectual property provides for a period of impossibility to use certain ideas of 25 years or more, depending on the category of the work. This applies even to publications on the Internet, which is often criticized by society. At the same time, governments of many countries are intensifying anti-piracy activity amid growing discontent among supporters of free exchange of information. But it’s hard to say for sure which of them is right. On the one hand, the artist really should not be hungry, and on the other - endlessly parasitize on one of his good idea.