Why Plagiarism Is Illegal
Plagiarism is a violation of a type of law known as intellectual property law, which designates the creator of something original as entitled to the rights to revenue from that creative work. Fundamentally, plagiarism laws exist to protect the property rights of creative persons over their original work.
Rationale
The intellectual property rights law concept, subdivided into copyright and trademark law, identifies the rights of creative individuals to ownership of materials arising from the creative process. Copyright protection covers verbal, audio and visual productions; trademark protection covers such things as a unique character [for example, Superman or MacGyver], a product name, a company logo or a technical invention. Plagiarism primarily concerns copyright violations.
Criminal Designation
Primarily, the law regards plagiarism as a crime of theft. However, as a misrepresentation of the actual source, plagiarism also qualifies as a crime of fraud. In both instances, plagiarism constitutes a property crime versus a violent crime or crime against another's person.
Victims
The primary victim of the crime of plagiarism is the actual originator or creator. In some instances, the dissemination of plagiarized material adversely impacts the present and/or future revenue that the actual creator of the material can reasonably expect to have received. The FindLaw website gives a good example of a particularly "dastardly" form of plagiarism, identified as the "memoir scoop." For example, pior reporting of a crunestory by the criminal undercuts the market of the crime victim by causing potential readers to perceive the story as something already known and for which they need not purchase a different version. While two truly different reports of the same story are not technically plagiarism--since copyright applies only to specific expression of ideas and not to an overall concept like a generalized storyline--this illustrates the fundamental problem of undermining the actual creator's rights to revenue that is involved in true plagiarism.
Fair Use
Copyright law includes a principle known as the "fair use" provision. Under this provision, the law takes the position that the societal benefit, and/or the benefit to the creator themselves through events likely to bolster future revenue from a particular created piece, justify some exceptions in which total control by the creator over their work exceeds a reasonable expectation under law. Materials used under the fair use provision, such as a single photocopy or printout of an otherwise protected work for purposes of properly cited use in research or for use in academic projects or book reviews, do not qualify as plagiarism. However, use of the exact phrasing, or excessive amounts of quoted material, do potentially affect the earnings from the original work of the creator, violating the creator's ownership and revenue rights. As with any theft, this justifies defining such activity as illegal.
Citation
Properly cited references used in the generation of a different work also do not qualify as plagiarism; provided they fall within intellectual property law restrictions limiting such things as the percentage of a work which the writer of the derivative work can include in a single direct quotation. Thus, the provisions of intellectual property law carefully define what does and does not qualify as plagiarism and defines activities that qualify as true plagiarism as illegal.
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