Plagiarism is the easiest yet the hardest problem for any editor to deal with. It one of the easiest problems for an editor to deal with because all he or she has to do is reject the article for publication. It’s one of the hardest problems for an editor to deal with because he or she can never be sure whether the author committed plagiarism deliberately or whether they committed it because they were actually ignorant of the rules involved. Most editors deal differently with those who knowingly commit the crime of stealing another author’s, creative artists, or photographer’s work, at least I would like to believe most editors do.
I always try to, but its not always easy to tell which category the violator falls into. For example, just today I reviewed an article submitted by an author and had to return it because of copyright infringements. The text was completely original but the photos that the author used to illustrate the article were taken from another copyrighted online site. The author did link back to that site to credit the photos to that site but that’s not enough if the author hasn’t received permission from the copyright holder to use the pictures. There are some online sites where photos are in the public domain and are free to use. There are other sites where photos are covered by the Creative Commons License and these too can be used as long as attribution is given in the manner requested by the CCL holder, but neither case applied with the photos in question. To paraphrase the definition given in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, plagiarism means to take someone else’s words and/or illustrations and pass them off as being your own. Plagiarism is to take credit for something you have no legal right to take credit for.
This article is written for all our honest contributors who wouldn’t dream of deliberately submitting someone else’s work as their own. The problem we all face including those of us who are suppose to be experts on the subject is committing accidental plagiarism. Accidental Plagiarism? How does one do that, you ask? We can commit plagiarism without realizing it because we often remember things that we read verbatim without consciously trying to. I often do this when I read technical manuals on electronics, computers, photography, aeronautics, and any number of other topics that really interests me. The problem with that is that when I write an article on that subject those words come into my mind readily but I have no way of knowing if they are an original thought or if I’m recalling something I read five years ago. The good news is that there is an easy way to catch this before you submit an article for publication and one of us catch it when we run it through our article checkers. Run your article yourself through the Article Checker online. It’ll only take a few seconds and it could keep you from having an article returned to you. More importantly, it’ll keep your reputation as a trusted author intact with any site that you write for. Here’s the link for the .Article Checker
One of the gray areas of the copyright law is using what is referred to as "Common Knowledge." The “common” way to talk about common knowledge is to say that it is knowledge that most educated people know or can find out easily in an encyclopedia or dictionary. Technically, we can use something that someone said without violating copyright law if what the person wrote is in the body of common knowledge. The trick here is to know what the average relatively well-educated adult would know. The safe way to go here is to always site your sources.
Everybody knows that one picture is worth ten thousand words, that’s common knowledge. Using pictures make your articles more meaningful and will increase your page views significantly but make sure that you have the legal right to use those photographs. If you don’t hold the copyright to them, you need to get permission from the copyright holder to use them before you actually include them in your article and then you need to include a link that links back to proof of that permission. There are sites where there are pictures covered by CCL and they are free to download and use as long as you give the CCL holder attribution as he or she specifies on the site. One of those sites is morgueFile.
The copyright law is very involved and very convolutes and not always very clear in a laws meaning but the United State’s Copyright Office provides a very good overview of the copyright law on its web site and it’s written in a language that easy for the non-lawyer to comprehend. Here’s the link http://www.copyright.gov/. This site is a good starting point for any writer, photographer, and/or graphic artist to start his or her education on the subjects of copyright and trademark laws.
As writers, we are also lifelong learners. Like the TV commercial states, "Inquiring minds want to know." My objectives in writing this article was not to teach you everything that you need to know about copyrights and trademarks but to whet your appetite to learn more on your own.
