This section comprises information, links, references and activities related to Authority and Intellectual Property. Questions or feedback should be directed to Stephanie Beams

• Copyright and Intellectual Property for Digital Resources
  • Key Principles in Intellectual Property
  • Academic Referencing
  • Copyright and the Internet
  • Copyright and Fair Use
• Plagiarism Detection for Teachers
• Software to Detect Plagiarism
• Plagiarism Stoppers
• Student Plagiarism
• World Standard in Prevention
• Plagiarism Resource
• Stopping Cheaters

1. Copyright and IP for digital resources

Reference: Intellectual Property In The Digital Age , By: Kennedy, Kristen, Technology & Learning, 10536728, Sep2001, Vol. 22, Issue 2

o Revenue sharing: How will the instructor and the employer-institution share revenue gained from the course if it's sold or licensed to another institution or company? Will residual fees compensate the course creator for their work? How will they be divided among collaborators?
o Portability: Can the teacher take some or all of the materials produced for that course to another school? Conversely, what rights do educational institutions have to run courses created by teachers who have left their jobs?
o Adapting or updating course materials: Who is ultimately responsible for updating content or adapting the course for different audiences or institutions, the educator or the school?
o Attribution rights: Will the course creator have the right to attribute their name to the course without actually owning it?

Academic Referencing of Internet-based Resources - http://www.spaceless.com/WWWVL/refs.html

"The rapid growth of the Internet has outstripped conventions for citing material from that source. Distinguishing material as a [computer file] does not provide sufficient information about the platform necessary for reading it. The URL provides useful information, but augmenting it with other details such as author and date not only provides a meaningful citation, its similarity to conventional bibliographic notation lends a greater degree of legitimacy in academic discourse. The article considers information derivable from the URL, and HTML documents (including non-displayed source text), in order to derive bibliography and inline text citations for various kinds of material. The conventions proposed are applicable to Gopher, FTP, Usenet News, journals distributed by listservers, and email."

Referencing WWW Pages - http://research.umbc.edu/~khoo/hub_acad.html

"WWW pages can be reference in a manner similar to that of conventional monographs. The author, title and date of the page can be extracted and used conventionally. The publisher information is replaced by the institution or group who maintain the computer upon which the WWW pages reside. This is usually indicated in the computer name section of the URL. The place of publication is replaced by the URL of the WWW page. In some cases, WWW pages are associated with an electronic journal. These pages can only be referenced as journals if more complete volume and number, or date, information is available. It is also worth considering the manner in which these documents could be accessed. Unlike conventional journals, it is possible, even likely, that articles will be accessed directly without reference to the journal. Each individual web page could be considered as a single stand alone document without any reference to an overarching journal affiliation."

As an example -
Brenner, Anita 1995, The Murder Trial: Genre or Event-Scene?, C-Theory,
http://english-server.hss.cmu.edu/ctheory/e-murder_trial.html

CAL - Copyright and the Internet - http://www.copyright.com.au/info%20sheets/CR20_copyright%20and%20the%20internet.pdf

o Can I forward emails containing copyright material?
If you forward an email containing copyright material to a third party you may be infringing copyright. This is because forwarding an email constitutes a communication to the public. So before forwarding any email that has been sent to you should check it for a copyright statement, or if none exists, it may be wise to seek permission from the owner of the copyright material contained in the email.

o Can I provide links to other websites?
Linking raises a number of complex copyright issues. Therefore, before linking to other material on the Internet there are a number of questions you should ask. These include:
- does the material I am linking to contain a copyright notice?
- have I asked the copyright owner for permission to link to their material?
- can I be sure that I am not linking to material that has been posted illegally?
- am I linking to material that is only available by subscription or payment?

o How do I get copyright protection for my material on the Internet?
Copyright is free and automatic. You don't have to pay for it, and you don't have to ask for it. The moment you create your work it is protected by copyright (provided it is sufficiently original). Copyright protection will usually last until 50 years after the death of the creator.

Copyright and Fair Use Article - http://access.k12.wv.us/internet/copydoc.htm

Myths include: everything on the Internet is free for the taking and can be used any way I want. E-mail messages, for instance, are automatically copyrighted by their author. Even though a web page may not have a copyright notice, that does not mean it is not protected. I am only using a small part so the author will not mind; I will give the author full credit so he will not care; and the author will thank me for publicizing his work. If you want to use copyrighted material then get permission. If you are not sure about the copyright then check.

Several court cases in California and Virginia have defined "viewing a web page" as a violation of copyright (reproduction of an author's work). Since a web page is stored in RAM and on the hard drive of a computer (and it is more than momentary), the web page contents have been reproduced. It is unlikely that the author made the site accessible to the general Internet community with the expectation that he/she would have to give permission to each individual that would want to view the site. But this does indicate the seriousness of the courts in protecting works published in electronic form.

Software on the Internet can be found that is public domain, freeware, shareware, or even commercial (some illegally). Just because it is there does not mean that you can download it and use it freely. You should also check all downloaded files for viruses. The Internet is rich in resources -- text, graphics, music, video, software, etc. -- which can be easily downloaded to your computer. Some of these are clearly marked as copyright protected and some are not. In some cases, even though the materials are copyright protected, permission is given to educators and students to use in the classroom for presentations and reports. Check the copyright of anything you get from the Internet before you use it on your web page or in the classroom. If you ask the author, many of them will give you permission to use their materials in an educational setting.

2. Plagiarism detection - issues and tools for teachers

The Plagiarism Resource Site - Software to detect plagiarism: WCopyfind
http://www.plagiarism.phys.virginia.edu/Wsoftware.html

This program examines a collection of document files. It extracts the text portions of those documents and looks through them for matching words in phrases of a specified minimum length. When it finds two files that share enough words in those phrases, WCopyfind generates html report files. These reports contain the document text with the matching phrases underlined.

What WCopyfind can do: It can find documents that share large amounts of text. This result may indicate that one file is a copy or partial copy of the other, or that they are both copies or partial copies of a third document.

What WCopyfind cannot do: It cannot search the web or internet to find matching documents for you. You must specify which documents it compares. Those documents can be local ones-on your computer or a file server-or, with versions 2.1 and higher, web-resident documents that are pointed to by localinternet shortcuts. If you suspect that a particular web page has been copied, you must create an internet shortcut to that page and include this shortcut in the collection of documents that you give to WCopyfind.

Plagiarism Stoppers: A Teacher's Guide - http://www.ncusd203.org/central/html/where/plagiarism_stoppers.html

"Plagiarism is a rapidly growing problem in many venues today. Because it is so easy to locate information using the Internet, students have given in to the temptation to take materials and use them for their own. This needs to be addressed by all who are in the education field -- by teaching the observance of proper citation and copyright compliance AND by making sure our students know that stealing someone else's work is wrong. This site may help you in your efforts towards these goals. Please feel free to suggest additional sites or information and recommendations for redesign."

Student Plagiarism in an Online World - http://www.asee.org/prism/december/html/student_plagiarism_in_an_onlin.htm

"Often lost in the discussion of plagiarism is the interest of the students who don't cheat. They do legitimate research and write their own papers. They work harder (and learn more) than the plagiarists, yet their grades may suffer when their papers are judged and graded against papers that are superior but stolen material. Students have a right to expect fairness in the classroom. When teachers turn a blind eye to plagiarism, it undermines that right and denigrates grades, degrees, and even institutions. Plagiarism is alive and well on campuses and in cyberspace. But educators should take some solace in the fact that while the Internet is a useful resource for plagiarists, it is also an excellent tool to use against them."

Turnitin - http://www.turnitin.com

Recognized worldwide as the standard in online plagiarism prevention, Turnitin helps educators and students take full advantage of the Internet's educational potential. Used by thousands of institutions in over fifty countries, Turnitin's products promote originality in student work, improve student writing and research skills, encourage collaborative learning, and save valuable instructor time.

Plagiarism Resource - http://www.library.fandm.edu/plagiarism.html

o The Internet provides a tempting array of opportunities for students to plagiarize with simple no-cost copying & pasting of content from a web browser into a word processor; ordering, for a fee easily charged to a credit-card, a pre-fabricated term paper ; "custom ordering" a paper from an Internet term paper mill such as "descartes-essays.com"

o Strategies for Detecting Plagiarism - some clues which may indicate unoriginal work: unusual formatting of the paper (odd use of space, inconsistent layout, etc.); variety of citation styles present; strange, extraneous text at the top and/or bottom of the page

Catching Digital Cheaters - http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/plagiarism.html

o Cell phones with built-in digital cameras and e-mail allow sneaky students to send silent questions and answers to one another right under teachers' noses, more than 55 percent of all 15- to 19-year-olds own a cell phone. Cameras and text messaging, increasingly common features, are raising new worries for teachers and administrators.

o Lawyers for Boston University are trying to end the sale of term papers over the Internet by filing a lawsuit against eight "paper mills." The lawsuit charged companies including Paper Shack, A-1 Termpapers and paperz.com - which sell essays on academic topics to students - with violating state and federal laws against wire fraud, mail fraud and racketeering.

o On most campuses, over 75% of students admit to some cheating.
In a 1999 survey of 2,100 students on 21 campuses across the country, about one-third of the participating students admitted to serious test cheating and half admitted to one or more instances of serious cheating on written assignments.

o Students Use Internet to Cheat By Jay Mathews and Valerie Strauss
Washington Post Staff Writers Tuesday, May 15, 2001; Page A07
More than half of students from 25 high schools across the country said in a new survey that they had used the Internet to commit plagiarism for school assignments. The survey by Rutgers University management professor Donald McCabe, who has researched academic integrity for many years, also said that nearly half of the students questioned said they think their teachers sometimes know students are cheating in class but ignore it.
McCabe said addressing the issue is difficult because it has become so common that, as one student told him, "It's starting to become 'normal' in some cases."

o An Antidote to Plagiarism - grade 5-10
Are you tired of grading reports written by mom and dad? This site has a lesson and activity that will show students how to write a research paper without copying. As long as you continue to assign research papers that are done outside of class, you will continue to get plagiarized papers. The total project should be completed at school with progress checks every step of the way. For instance outlines, note cards, rough drafts, etc. should be graded and carry just as much weight as the final paper itself. Setting up a rubric that gives points for each step in the process is the way to go. It takes a lot of class time to do the whole process at school, but it is well worth it when the kids are actually writing their own papers.

o Cut-and-Paste Plagiarism
Preventing, Detecting and Tracking Online Plagiarism. An online
article for educators that defines plagiarism, offers prevention suggestions,gives detective tips, and describes ways to track it down. Included within the article is a list of some of the sources of plagiarized papers so that you can become familiar with them. The author suggests that one way of detecting a plagiarized paper is to identify unusual keywords or unique phrases in the paper and then conduct a web search for those words through a large search engine.

Useful Web Links

Copyright Symbol Download Web Site

http://www.copyrightauthority.com/copyright-symbol

Commonwealth Government Intellectual Property Site

http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/

Australian Intellectual Property Law Locus

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~pxc/iplocus/

To print the information above as a Microsoft Word document, click this link.

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