for a grade.
Copyright infringement, on the other hand, serves to protect the rights of an author to a reward for her or his work and incentive for creating future works. Copyright infringement claims are usually brought under the legal system when an act of copying has caused some sort of loss of monetary value in the work. If a person writes a book, but another person copies parts of it, markets it, and sells it, even when giving attribution to the original author, the new work will compete in the same market as the first book and negatively affect its sales. This is not to say that writers may feel free to copy a copyrighted work if it is for a nonprofit purpose. Some nonprofit uses also have an adverse effect on the value of intellectual and creative works. Therefore, in the case of copyright infringement, even if attribution for a source is given, copying, using, and/or distributing another’s copyrighted work may prevent an author from receiving reward for their work. While attribution will assist with plagiarism charges, in itself it does not negate copyright infringement claims.
Misconceptions about Copyright Infringement and Plagiarism
Given these key distinctions between plagiarism and copyright law, we can begin to complicate the seemingly simple message perpetuated in popular discourse often circulated on college campuses, “don’t steal.” We have seen that not all copying is treated equally; that is, different types of copying for different purposes yield different consequences. Based on the discussion above, we know that some copying may constitute plagiarism but not copyright infringement, and vice versa. We might further complicate the relationship between plagiarism and copyright infringement by considering the ways popular misconceptions of intellectual theft are often in conflict with the common composing activities of recycling and reusing materials that student writers engage in, such as those presented in the scenarios at the opening of this chapter. It is important to recognize that there are other “gray areas” that exist between what is considered intellectual theft under plagiarism policies and the law, and the range of composing activities that require the copying and reuse of existing materials.
Is All Copying Theft?
Often in writing classes, the act of copying is equated with intellectual theft, which is contrasted with the notion of originality of words and ideas. What makes this dichotomy between theft and originality problematic is that an autonomous, proprietary model for textual ownership conflicts with what we understand about actual composing processes. As Rebecca Moore Howard points out in Standing in the Shadows of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators, student writers move toward membership of a discourse community by using other writers’ texts and drawing from multiple voices. For instance, when learning to write a research paper, students are often asked to prepare notes or create paraphrases, summaries, and direct quotations of existing literature on a topic, and then later arrange them within the structure of their own main points or arguments. This work is often done digitally, by copying and pasting source material into a file that eventually becomes reused and revised and built upon, resulting in a polished research essay. In this process, we can see that the distinctions between copied texts and students’ own words can become less obvious, and the dichotomy between theft and originality can become blurred. Writers relying on this process do not create new works from nothing, in isolation, but rather they borrow, build on, and interact with other texts with which they have come into contact. This act of writing is fundamentally collaborative with other texts, relying on reuse and integration of existing works.
In fact, we copy works without plagiarizing or committing copyright infringement all the time. There are many examples of ways writers copy and reuse materials that do not constitute an unethical act of intellectual “theft.” For instance, consider the following activities in which writers copy others’ works:
Using models or templates when writing within a new genre or completing an assignment (i.e., using the design, layout, categories, and format, but plugging in one’s own content);
Summarizing or paraphrasing ideas from texts into notes when preparing to write a research paper; and
Incorporating ideas from a peer, writing tutor, or other influential source when revising a piece of writing.
While these activities obviously require some level of copying, they are also common activities engaged in by writers as we perform the activities required of us in the classroom. Therefore, rather than understanding that “all copying is theft,” we might instead understand that “some copying is allowable.” The task for instructors and students is to think critically and carefully about under what circumstances and for what purposes the copying occurs.
This is not to say that some copying is not unethical or not allowable in certain contexts. There is a tension that exists between borrowing too much from an existing source and building on a source to offer something new: Copying and passing something off as your own can be an ethical and legal violation, but copying something with the intention of adding value, or because it is part of a natural composing process, may not. For instance, a writer might choose to create a parody of an existing work of art, perhaps a parody of a beauty advice column from Cosmopolitan magazine that provides social commentary on media-imposed standards for beauty inflicted on women. This act of copying would likely be an ethical and lawful form of copying, contributing to the advancement of knowledge on issues of gender and the media. However, downloading a copy of a research paper on media portrayals of standards of beauty and turning it in for class credit is an obvious ethical (and likely legal) violation, offering no added value in the creation of a new work. The point here is that there are gray areas that exist between different forms of copying: Some forms of copying are beneficial and others detrimental to the promotion of learning.
Does the Internet Contribute to Plagiarism?
Seeking to further complicate the conflation of all types of copying as intellectual “theft,” it is also useful to think about a common belief that the Internet itself contributes to intellectual theft. Writing online often involves collaborating with other writers or cutting, pasting, and reusing text, all of which may be at odds with common understandings of plagiarism policies and/or copyright law. It is not uncommon to hear on our campuses and in our classrooms that the Internet makes plagiarism easier, or that cutting and pasting material from the Internet should be avoided altogether. In these statements and others like them, the Internet itself is credited for undesirable outcomes: the facilitation of legal and ethical infractions. Rather than viewing the use of writing technologies as facilitating common modes of composing, these perspectives posit writing electronically as causing certain offenses. The common activities of student writers—copying and pasting excerpts from online texts when conducting research, finding templates and models from other sources, relying on existing discussions to inform and guide their own writing—are each facilitated by Internet technologies. However, these same technologies are often presented as inherently dangerous, as causing a rise in cases of plagiarism or making copyright infringement more prevalent. We should be particularly careful about assuming this negative approach to the relationship between technology and writing. Instead of “blaming” technology for unethical or unlawful practices, we might instead view technologies as facilitators, through their copy, paste, and distribution functionalities, of the strategies fundamental to contemporary composing practices.
The misconceptions about copying in composing processes presented here are only two among many. Broadly speaking, the approaches to plagiarism and copyright infringement in writing classrooms and on college campuses often appear to have a common goal of exposing intellectual thieves, with the ultimate intention of denouncing and punishing them. Students who commit ethical infractions by cheating certainly deserve punishment within the academic setting, and students who knowingly commit copyright infringement are certainly liable under the law. Unfortunately, contemporary approaches to the two offenses do not offer effective strategies for addressing the range of activities that student writers engage in that might be allowable copying. Too often, a student writer engaging in any of a wide range of activities may be unfairly accused of either plagiarism (at the academic level) or copyright
