Plagiarism On the Internet and What You Can Do When It Happens to You

The word plagiarism has been around since the 1620s, and plagiary since the late 1500s, so this is not some newfangled idea people made up to make life difficult. It has been considered a bad thing to claim the works of others as one's own for hundreds of years — be the works written, visual, or conceptual — but people seem more confused than ever now about what plagiarism is and why it is a bad thing to do.



A common misconception these days is that works published on the internet somehow fall outside the usual rules of theft and appropriation, but the truth is that the rules don't change just because something is published in one medium and not another. The same rules apply whether the material being used is from a printed book, a recording, or someone's website.

People often use words like "borrowing" or "copying" to describe what happens when work is plagiarized, but the truth is that it is actually fraud to falsely claim ownership of another author's work and present it as your own.

Yes, FRAUD.

I have had to deal with plagiarism more than once over the last couple of years, and, in each circumstance, the individuals who plagiarized my work not only did not admit to wrong-doing, but they also persisted in the plagiarism until I either wrote about their actions publicly or, as in this last instance, had their website removed from the internet altogether by their web host until they removed the plagiarized content.

In light of my most recent experience, I thought I'd offer a brief education about plagiarism, fair dealing/fair use, copyright, how to avoid plagiarizing others, and how you can deal with plagiarism of your own work, because a lot of us have not been taught what the boundaries are, and it really gets in the way of good internet citizenship when someone crosses the line.

This isn't only about being a good neighbour, though. It is your responsibility to be aware of and then act according to copyright law and fair dealing/fair use if you publish online and/or use social sites like Pinterest, Tumblr, or Facebook, because ignorance of the law is no excuse.

What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism is:

1. when the ideas or words of another are used or closely imitated without the source's permission and passed off as one's own.
2. when an idea or work is presented as something new but is actually taken from another original source.
3. when another's work is used or closely imitated without crediting the original source.

The following actions are considered plagiarism:

• turning in someone else's work as your own
• copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit
• failing to put a quotation in quotation marks
• giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation
• changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit
• copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not

What is fair dealing/fair use?

There are circumstances when it is okay to use part of another author's work using what in Canada is termed "fair dealing" and in the United States is termed "fair use".

In Canada, fair dealing "...offers some exceptions to the Copyright Act's general prohibition on copying. Fair dealing allows limited and non-commercial copying for the purposes of research or private study, criticism, review, and news reporting".

In the United States, fair use "...is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and "transformative" purpose such as to comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work."

Fair dealing and fair use basically mean that another author's work can be used in part with certain restrictions without crossing into plagiarism. For instance, you can use a smaller part of a work, such as a quotation of a sentence or paragraph, to comment on or critique it as long as you cite the work in question.

What is copyright?

"Copyright is a set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work. Copyright does not protect ideas, only their expression." (Wikipedia)

In Canada, "...[copyright] protection is effective even without registration" and is generally held until 50 years after the creator's death, as long as the material meets the following requirements:

• the material is literary, dramatic, musical, or artistic,
• it covers the expression of the idea but not the idea itself,
• the expression of the thought must be original if not the thought itself, and
• the creator of the work must be connected with "...either Canada or a member of any number of other international trade or copyright treaties, including the Berne Convention."

Further information about copyright in Canada can be found at the Department of Justice Canada website.

In the United States, the following works can be registered for copyright:

• literary works (articles, stories, journals, computer programs, and pictures and graphics)
• architectural blueprints
• music and song lyrics
• plays and screenplays
• audiovisual and sound recordings.

Further information about copyright in the United States can be found at the United States Copyright Office website.

Read "Canada and the United States: Differences in Copyright Law" for more information about the similarities and differences between the two countries and how they understand copyright protection.

How you can avoid plagiarizing the works of others:

• Familiarize yourself with fair dealing/fair use.
• Familiarize yourself with copyright.
• Unless otherwise noted by the work's author, assume copyright is in place.
• Limit your longer quotes to 250 words or less to stay on the safe side of copyright. Wikiquote has good guidelines for safe use regarding quantity.
• Secure an author's permission before republishing either a larger portion of their work or a copy of it in its entirety.
• CITE YOUR SOURCES. Use proper citation to accredit online or offline works to their original authors. When online, make sure to link directly to your sources.

How you can deal with plagiarism of your work:

• Use an online plagiarism checker like Copyscape to scan the internet for copies of your written work being republished without your permission.
• Save a screen capture of your plagiarized content. You may need this in the future to prove your case.
• Perform a Whois check for the domain in question if you work is being plagiarized. This should give you information about the website owner and the registrar and how to contact them.
• Contact the website's owner explaining that the content has been plagiarized and that it must be removed immediately.
• Contact the hosting provider if the website owner does not remove the offending content. The hosting provider can ask them to remove the offending content or can even remove the website altogether if the website owner fails to comply.
• Contact the website's advertisers. Plagiarized content is often used to try to boost ad dollars, so contacting their advertisers can remove their incentive to plagiarize.
• File a report to search engines that your content is being fraudulently reproduced. Search engines can be helpful, because it is in their best interest not to have duplicate content showing up in results. They have the power to ban the site from their listings.
• Write about the website owner's behaviour publicly. I had to resort to this action at one point, and it was not pretty. This is a course of action best reserved for repeat, unapologetic plagiarizers who refuse to comply with decency and the law. Be careful if you go this route to avoid libel.
• Pursue legal action against the website owners responsible for the continued plagiarism of your work. If you live in the United States, one option that may be cheaper than hiring a lawyer is DMCA Takedown Services, which uses the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a U.S. copyright law, that "...addresses the rights and obligations of owners of copyrighted material who believe their rights under U.S. copyright law have been infringed, particularly but not limited to, on the Internet".

I want to make it clear that I am not a lawyer, so please do your research when using the works of others and defending your own plagiarized material.

Now, let me repeat: it is your responsibility to be aware of and then act according to copyright law and fair dealing/fair use if you publish online and/or use social sites like Pinterest, Tumblr, or Facebook. We all work hard on the content we create, and if we find content important enough to share, it only makes sense to credit the author behind that content.

Have you ever been plagiarized? Have you ever inadvertently plagiarized another author? What did you do about it?

Sad Days Get Better

Yesterday was a sad day. Nothing bad happened. I was just sad. I think I'm coming down from the vulnerability overload of working on and then delivering my TEDxRegina talk.



I eventually put on my coat and left the apartment. I just couldn't take another moment with nothing to concentrate on but the discomfort of my own skin — you get that, right? — and so it was that I found myself out in the street several blocks from home before I realized that I had nowhere to go.



I walked into a Shoppers Drug Mart where I was hassled by Jillian Michaels. She's so damn finger-pointy that I just want to judge her right back and diagnose her with psychological disorders. If I was her manager, I'd work on showing the softer side of Jillian, the side with less fingers attacking my psyche when all I want to do is buy vitamins, for the love of god.



Oh, look. I took a sneaky picture of a stranger's badonka-donk on an escalator. I betcha this is what Jillian was getting all pointy about. Other people's butts are none of my business.



I stopped for a little while to wallow in the cold, heartless, militaristic, fear-based monstrosity which was levelled over a park, bricked in, and studded with inhumane metal structures over the last year just to feed this sort of feeling, it seems. Now the drug dealers are gone, and so is everyone else.

Are you sick of me going on about this feeling yet? Me, too. It was a very long day.



BAM! A statue of John A. MacDonald!



If this statue is to scale, that dude got all the ladies.



I decided it was high time to snap out of it and tucked myself into a small restaurant where I ate cake. I'm always eating cake lately. The heavier and thicker and stickier the cake the better. I ate a peanut butter and jam square that I could almost pretend was a sandwich, so I passed it off as lunch.



Yum.



DEAD BIRD!

I couldn't resist another dead bird photo. I wish I'd been able to stay and take more pictures of it, but there were people around, and a couple of them noticed me hovering over this carcass, and things just start to feel really awkward socially once your public carcass-hovering has been detected.

Don't look at me like that. I'll have you know that people send me pictures and news stories about dead birds. I'm not alone in this, you know. Geez.

Just to balance out the forces...



...ALIVE BIRD!

You're welcome. I know you were worried about the forces.

At any rate, I'm feeling much better now. I threw myself a kitchen dance party to the totally dirty and offensive and NSFW Azealia Banks and twirled around with one of the cats and made myself one of those rare perfect cups of coffee where I got the cream/coffee/brown sugar ratio just right.

My advice for curing a sad day? Walk it out. Throw a kitty dance party. Eat cake. Dead birds are optional.

Five Star Friday's 190th Edition Is Brought to You By Neil Gaiman

"Five Star Friday's 190th Edition Is Brought to You By Neil Gaiman":

This week's Five Star Friday is brought to you by a life with alcohol, learning to define your own desires, rituals and the weight of love, a celebration of motherhood, the cost of operating an alcoholic, a cancer diagnosis, memory loss and growing up, and Neil Gaiman...

And No Fish Tacos Were Had: Wandering, Disappointment, and Paying Attention

Yesterday, the Palinode and I set out on a fish taco adventure, or at least we tried to.



Not those kind of fish tacos.

*ahem*



Our intent was to go to Taco Del Mar to try their fish tacos, but it turned out that Taco Del Mar was busy being transmogrified into Mad Ta c o, a restaurant I can never go to now because of its overwhelming kerning issues. Really bad kerning and a blatant disregard for design give me a case of the sads.



Also, no fish tacos could be had! The universe obviously hated us, or at least it hated the Palinode. I was fine with it, because I won't eat fish tacos on principle. Cooked fish smells like a toilet to me, and I can think of several things that make better taco-filler.



So, we started wandering.

One thing I like about not having a car is that you are more given to adventure. If we had a car, we would have just gotten back into it and driven somewhere else, but, as it was, we had just gotten out of a cab and weren't about to pay twice as much to go nowhere we wanted to go, so we set off on foot.

We didn't have a map. We didn't consult our iPhones. We just wandered in a general southwesterly direction through 1970s suburbs in the hopes of running into a Chapters book store.

We didn't choose not to consult our gadgets. It just escaped us to do so. I think we were supposed to wander and forget for a few hours. People used to do that.

In the 1990s, I had a pile of magazine articles I'd saved about ideas I wanted to think about, and one of the articles was about just this kind of wandering. It reminded me of when I was a kid and I would secretly pack a snack and set out on my own to get lost somewhere. I often ended up walking or biking right out of the city and would find myself watching the highway from a farmer's field.



We ended up in a large, empty field we didn't recognize next to a highway we didn't recognize, just like it was 1983.



And then we ended up on a wide, empty street we didn't recognize next to another road we didn't recognize.

It felt good. If you don't know where you are, no one else probably does, either. You're free.



We ended up in the parking lot of dying mall at the edge of town where a Montana's restaurant vacuumed us up and pushed as much fat and sugar on us as it could. Their menu defies any adherence to an ethical sense of the social contract.



Before the food we ate had a chance to make us feel bad about ourselves and society in general, we took comfort in coffee and our cool booth.





I am going to write a book called How to Take Awkward Self-Portraits and Endear Yourself to Waitresses.



Also? Montana's should stamp your distended gut with its logo on your way out. It would create a more fully integrated experience. Moo. I am now a diabetic cow.



We found Chapters! I passed on buying the book of poetry I really want again — Anne Carson's Nox — and I don't know why. It looks delicious.





We had walked so far that I could still feel my thigh muscles going pop pop pop while we drank our coffee.

I was besieged by the feeling that I wanted to buy something, but I wanted nothing in particular. It's unsettling to want to spend money with no object in mind. It makes me feel insecure and shiftless. This is what places like Chapters do, and I know that, but the feeling sneaks in and tries to convince me that I need to by a pad of paper in the shape of a butterfly or sheets of fake chalkboard that claim they probably won't stick to my walls unless I repaint them.



It is important to stay critical. Your attention will be stolen and your life will be lost with all of the looking at things that are not actually related to you as though they are related you.





Thinking back, I should have just bought that book of Anne Carson poetry, though. Sometimes denial is just masochism.

Grace in Small Things: Sunday Edition #99

1. Finding the above ridiculous photo that makes it look like my breasts are cats with which I am trying to impose breastfeeding on a third cat, which was not the intent of the photo at all
2. Guacamole
3. Crossing doing a TED talk off my life list
4. May long weekend!
5. Showering in the early morning with all the lights off and the windows wide open so I can kind of pretend that I'm outside while I do it like I'm in one of those old Irish Spring soap commercials:

Wage a battle against embitterment and take part in Grace in Small Things.

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PS. I love the lengths they go to in order to prove the manly manliness of this soap. Not only do they show us shirtless outdoor wrestling and extremely hairy chests, but they also carve through the soap with knife. We can already see the colour variation in the soap, but he cuts through that mofo with a KNIFE. Men, this is your soap.