Legal Definitions - plagiarism

Plagiarism is the act of taking someone else's original ideas, words, or creative expressions and presenting them as if they were your own, without proper acknowledgment or permission. It is fundamentally a misrepresentation of authorship. While generally not a criminal offense, plagiarism is a serious ethical violation in academic, professional, and creative fields, often leading to severe disciplinary actions. In specific circumstances, such as infringing on a copyright or breaching a contract that requires original work, plagiarism can have legal consequences.

Here are some examples to illustrate plagiarism:

• Academic Context: Imagine a college student writing a research paper on climate change. Instead of conducting their own analysis or properly citing sources, the student copies several paragraphs verbatim from a published scientific journal article and inserts them into their paper without using quotation marks or providing a citation. They then submit the paper as their own original work.

  This is plagiarism because the student is presenting another author's exact words and ideas as if they were their own, failing to give credit to the original source. This violates academic integrity policies.

• Professional Writing Context: Consider a marketing professional tasked with writing a new blog post for their company's website about emerging industry trends. To save time, they find a well-written article on a competitor's blog, change a few words and sentence structures, but essentially reproduce the core arguments, data points, and conclusions without attributing any of it to the original author or source.

  This constitutes plagiarism because the marketing professional is taking the substantive content and intellectual work of another writer and passing it off as their own original creation for professional gain, undermining the credibility of their own work and their company.

• Creative/Artistic Context: A graphic designer is hired to create a unique logo for a new startup company. Instead of developing a fresh concept, the designer finds an existing logo design from a lesser-known artist online, makes minor alterations to the colors and font, and then presents it to the client as their original, bespoke creation.

  This is an act of plagiarism because the designer is knowingly presenting another artist's original creative expression as their own work, deceiving the client and violating the ethical standards of their profession.