as plagiarism. In Martin’s study, 81% of humanities instructors considered it plagiarism, whereas 100% of science instructors defined it as plagiarism (69).
Works Cited
Ashworth, Peter, Philip Bannister, and Pauline Thorne. “Guilty in Whose Eyes? University Students’ Perceptions of Cheating and Plagiarism in Academic Work and Assessment.” Studies in Higher Education 22.2 (1997): 187–203. Print.
Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Sexuality, Textuality: The Cultural Work of Plagiarism.” College English 62 (2000): 473–91. Print.
Love, Patrick, and Janice Simmons. “Factors Influencing Cheating and Plagiarism among Graduate Students in a College of Education.” College Student Journal 32 (1998): 539–49. Print.
Martin, Amy. “Plagiarism and Collaboration: Suggestions for ‘Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices.’” Writing Program Administration 28.3 (2005): 57–71. Print.
Roig, Miguel. “When College Students’ Attempts at Paraphrasing Become Instances of Potential Plagiarism.” Psychological Reports 84 (1999): 973–82. Print.
Spigelman, Candace. “Habits of Mind: Historical Configurations of Textual Ownership in Peer Writing Groups.” College Composition and Communication 49 (1998): 234–55. Print.
Questions for Discussion
1. Discuss with peers and your instructor(s) the “concepts of originality, common knowledge, and collaboration” that Phillip Marzluf discusses. Working in groups, talk about what you think each of those concepts means to you, and compare it to the definitions in Marzluf’s essay. How do your definitions compare to or contrast with those of your instructor? Why?
2. Marzluf writes, “The scenarios consist of the four variables that appear most often in my discussions about plagiarism with teachers and students: the writer’s level of intentionality, the degree of appropriation, the borrowing of ideas and/or expression, and the status of the source.” Now that you have read his chapter, go back to the definition of plagiarism that you wrote before you read the chapter. How would you rank the variables Marzluf discusses in terms of their importance in determining whether something is plagiarized? How does your ranking change your definition of what constitutes plagiarism?
2 Plagiarism vs. Copyright Law: Is All Copying Theft?
Jessica Reyman
Before You Read: What images or emotions are conjured when you hear the phrases “plagiarism” and “allowable copying”? Consider what it means to “own” an idea.
Scenario 1
A student uses a template when creating a formal report for class. She has seen this method used for composing in her internship, where she writes letters, reports, and other documents for a company. She finds a model of a formal report on the Internet that closely matches the model she found in her textbook, and uses it as a template. She copies the headings and formatting, and even some of the sentence structures from various sections. She pastes her own content into the report. Is this stealing?
Scenario 2
A student is creating a website for his writing class. While he is confident in his ability to write the content for the site, he does not have the time or resources to learn advanced Web design and coding skills before the assignment is due. In order to submit a professional-looking website, he copies some source code from an existing website and pastes it into his own source code. The student has written all of the content for the website on his own, but the architecture, structure, organization, and user interface of the site is mostly derived from the source code he has copied from an existing website. Is this stealing?
Scenario 3
A student submits a research paper that summarizes and reports on information she has found in journals, books, websites, and blogs. In the paper, she cites many sources, but one website is particularly useful. From this source, she cites liberally, even copying and pasting whole paragraphs of text that support her points. She provides attribution in each instance, for both paraphrases and direct quotations from the source. Is this stealing?
Many students fear they may be “stealing” or committing intellectual property “theft” whenever they make use of any existing material in their writing. They have been warned against such uses by several sources. Instructors and university administrators tell them they must follow plagiarism policies or they will be expelled from school. In the news, they see their peers venture into the professional world and face public criticism for plagiarism. Consider the 2003 scandal surrounding Jayson Blair, a recent college graduate who was employed as a staff writer for the New York Times, who allegedly plagiarized an article from another newspaper; and, the 2006 accusations against undergraduate student Kaavya Viswanathan for allegedly plagiarizing passages for her novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Warnings against copyright infringement claims are also prevalent, as students are inundated by the messages from media companies and campus officials alike, who counsel them on the dangers of pirating music and movies from the Internet. Some universities have even aided the entertainment industry in pursuing legal action against individual students caught illegally downloading files, resulting in costly settlements. These stories and others have infiltrated conversations on many college campuses, warning students against copying with a seemingly simple message: “Don’t steal.”
However, the message is not that simple. Students often hold misconceptions about what constitutes theft of intellectual property. Such misconceptions have the potential to lead students to unwittingly commit a legal and/or ethical offense by assuming that all copying is acceptable, a great concern for college instructors and administrators. Alternatively, they can lead to students not using the material in question for fear of punishment, another serious problem that can frustrate students’ writing efforts and lessen the value of their work. Students will want to better understand the nuances inherent in defining what constitutes plagiarism and copyright infringement so that they can make more informed choices about when and how to use external sources. As a starting point, this chapter seeks to complicate the message of “don’t steal” in two ways. First, I show that what intellectual theft refers to is actually two separate offenses: copyright infringement and plagiarism. While the concepts are intertwined in popular discourse as constituting “stealing,” the label conflates and oversimplifies two distinct and complex offenses. Campus administrators, instructors, and students often misunderstand the relationship between plagiarism and copyright law. Many think plagiarism is wrong because it is illegal, and many believe attribution affects cases of copyright infringement. These misunderstandings, among others, can confuse conversations about student writers’ ethical and legal responsibilities when using sources. After defining key differences between the two concepts, I then show how much of what is regarded as stealing might actually fall within the range of what is considered allowable copying. For instance, do the tasks of downloading papers from an online paper mill, and cutting, pasting, and reusing excerpts of text with attribution demand equal treatment under plagiarism policies and under the law? Is either acceptable practice? In the second part of this chapter, I argue for a distinction between allowable copying and theft that acknowledges the gray areas that exist between original composition, copyright infringement, plagiarism, copying, and reusing text.
Plagiarism vs. Copyright Infringement
In order to complicate the notion of intellectual theft, it is first important to make clear distinctions between the institutional concept of plagiarism and the legal concept of copyright infringement. The two concepts are two distinct offenses that student writers face, both in their current academic settings and in their future professional contexts. As defined in the Council Chronicle, a publication for the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE):
