Copyright Resources

How is plagiarism different from copyright?

• Copyright is a legal protection
• Plagiarism is misrepresenting someone else's ideas as your own, and is something faculty closely monitors on students' papers.

Common ways to avoid plagiarism include:

• cite it  (getting comfortable with a citation management system such as RefWorks is a huge help)
• re-phrase it substantially
• credit it informally  (eg "Sloane et al. believe that...")
• Ask yourself  “Where is my voice in this project?”

You want to use, verbatim, a short paragraph of someone else’s work in your own paper. You decide it falls under “fair use” and include the paragraph, word for word.  Not an example of copyright infringement. However, if you do not cite it, thereby presenting it as your own work (either intentionally or not) - that is Plagiarism.