3 ms·
You're conflating the idea of copyright violation and plagiarism. Copyright violoation is violating someone's exclusive right to control a piece of original con
by adrusi 11y ago
You're conflating the idea of copyright violation and plagiarism. Copyright violoation is violating someone's exclusive right to control a piece of original content. Plagiarism is claiming someone else's ideas as your own. Ideas are not protected by intellectual property law, although plagiarism is usually also fraud. You can avoid commiting plagiarism by adding a citation. A citation basically states "These ideas were not originally mine, I got them from so-and-so".
You're usually not going to want to reproduce so much of a work in your research that copyright law would come into play (you can legally paste a few sentences from a book on your blog IANAL). Often though a research paper fits into a category protected by fair use so you can anyway.
But you can't reproduce and distribute an entire piece of copyright protected work just by providing a citation. I hope you haven't done this. If you have, you should take everything down. Do not apologize to the copyright holder. Talk to a lawyer.
- nadams 11y ago> You're usually not going to want to reproduce so much of a work in your research that copyright law would come into play (you can legally paste a few sentences from a book on your blog IANAL). The content of the encyclopedia is still copyrighted material of the company - copyright law is always in effect. Also - when writing a program it would most likely be composed of different projects. I would find it very unlikely that you aren't using a library or piece of code that is copyrighted or licensed by someone else. > Often though a research paper fits into a category protected by fair use so you can anyway. You could still apply fair use for code - and if your derivative work is for non-commercial use then it would be hard to argue a copyright violation [1]. Especially if you tried to contact the author and didn't get a response. > But you can't reproduce and distribute an entire piece of copyright protected work just by providing a citation. I never said you could? > I hope you haven't done this. If you have, you should take everything down. I never said I did? You didn't express the big picture problem - if I release some unlicensed code into the wild and people start using it - does that give me the right to sue everyone on the planet? [1] http://ogc.harvard.edu/pages/copyright-and-fair-use http://ogc.harvard.edu/pages/copyright-and-fair-use [2] http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/intellectual-property/fair-use-law.html http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/intellectual-property/fair-...