This is nothing new: Technology makes it easy to subvert legal and proper use of information in its various forms. Issues related to copyright apply in a similar vein to plagiarism. In fact, copyright abuse and plagiarism are like two sides of a permission coin--on the one side, people take without asking, and on the other side, people take without telling. We know that librarians work hard to support copyright protection, but what are they doing about plagiarism? Plagiarism is theft and lying--using information that doesn't belong to you and passing it off as your own. It is mostly thought of as a problem in education, usually pertaining to student abuses. But there are times when experts use materialwithout giving credit to the source--most recently in cases regarding historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Putting too much of someone else's words, or even their ideas, into your own work without giving the owner credit is ethically andlegally wrong. FIGHTING PLAGIARISM: ONE TEACHER'S BATTLE This column is dedicated to my new hero, Christine Pelton, a high school teacher in rural Piper, Kansas. Several months ago, Pelton failed 28 students for plagiarizing and then resigned when the school board insisted she reverse her decision.The board had not only ordered her to give students partial credit, but they had even gone so far as to interfere with her duties by demanding she decrease the course's final project from 50 percent to 30 percent of the students' grades (evidently in a move to justify their actions). She quit not only because the board usurped her authority, but also because the students no longer showed her respect afterward. Students were given a warning at the beginning of the semester that cheating, including plagiarism, would not be tolerated. When papers were turned in, Pelton noticed similarities in many of them.
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