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According to Jensen (n.d), plagiarism defines as uses another author’s text or content and presents it as their own effort without any quotation and citation for it. Based on Scanlon & Neumann (2002) survey done by 698 undergraduates from nine colleges reported that they do their work by copy and paste the text from the Internet without citation. Another indication of growth of Internet plagiarism is the development of plagiarism detection software. For example, Scanmyessay.com, Turnitin.com and canexus.com are software that enables students to check their plagiarism rate.
There is an article posted by Pichon (2011) about a copyrighted lawsuit. A company named Righthaven specializing in copyright litigation sued a user of medjacksports.com named Wayne Hoehn. It was because Hoehn posted an article to bring out a discussion. Due to the article that posted by Hoehn is not for commercial purpose, therefore Righthaven could not bring the case to the court. Federal judge in Nevada declared that Hoehn’s posted article was fair use.
According to Kravets (2011) fair use means that reproducing a copyrighted material for the purpose of commenting, teaching, research and also critics. A person can get the copyrighted materials without informing the right owner. Besides that, another reason Righthaven could not bring the case to court because Righthaven have no legal standing. Legal standing means a legal right to bring the lawsuit on behalf of the copyrights owner. The articles was originally belongs to Stephens Media.
Hence, from the case study above, students must aware on the differences between the online plagiarism and fair use. Misuse of this both will lead to punishment from the institutions or worst case end up a lawsuit. Especially students in Malaysia, they doing copycat work because they always do assignments last minute. Some of the students said their English is poor, but that is not the excuses to do plagiarize work.
References:
Jensen, R n.d, The Plagiarism Problem, University of Illinois, Chicago, viewed on 14 November 2011< http://www.oah.org/pubs/nl/2002aug/jensen.html>
Pichon, F 2011, Copyrighted material: fair and unfair use, viewed on 14 November 2011, <http://www.editorsweblog.org/newsrooms_and_journalism/2011/06/copyrighted_material_fair_and_unfair_use.php>
Scanlon, P.M & Neuman, D.R 2002, Internet Plagiarism Among College Student, Rochester Institute of Technology, viewed on 15 November 2011, <http://www4.ncsu.edu/~ladare/eac595/readings/scanlon-neumann.pdf>
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