CHAPTER 10Ethically Communicating the Information You OrganizedDestiny Williams, Criminal Justice; Kenny Caraballo & Toni-Anne Lawrence, Medical BillingBy the End of This Chapter, You Will Be Able To:?Define, recognize, and acknowledge intellectual property?Define, recognize, and acknowledge copyright?Define, recognize, and acknowledge fair use?Define, identify, and avoid instances of plagiarism Here’s What We Know from Chapter 9?How to determine when and how you need to cite a source?How to create an APA-style in-text citation?How to create an APA-style full citation?How to cite print books?How to cite print periodicals?How to use database citation tools?How to use open-web citation tools?How to cite websites?How to cite social media sites190?Intellectual PropertyRemember back in Chapter 2, when we talked about the “knowledge economy” and how in this Information Age it is human intellectual ability that creates content of value, and how this content is increasingly knowledge-, rather than physical object, based? Intellectual property plays a key role in this process. What is “intellectual property”? Intellectual property is content created by the intellect, or mind, in both tangible and intangible form.What does this mean?”Tangible” means something that can be touched. Tangible property relates to the more traditional items of ownership, such as the computer microchip. “Intangible” is the flipside of tangible, and means that which cannot be touched; intangible items are without a physical presence. With these two categories combined, intellectual property can include books, journal articles and graphics you included in your Semester Project (tangible), but also copyright, trademarks, patents and brand identity (intangible). Intellectual property rights are held by the original creator of the material, regardless of whether formal registration has occurred with the U.S. Copyright Office.Intellectual property such as print books and periodical articles are easily identified because you can touch them, hold them, flip through their pages; they are tangible. What about intangible? Just because you can’t touch something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In fact, intangible property forms a substantial portion of the intellectual property of our time, even as it can be difficult to identify.Back in the day, when everything was in hardcopy and print only, if you took something that didn’t belong to you, put it in your research project and said it was yours, you knew it was stealing. The best you could hope for was that you wouldn’t get caught. How times have changed. In today’s mashup culture, mixes and “sampling” are often gestures of admiration and respect. Unfortunately, what may be considered actions of esteem and regard in a popular environment might well be considered theft and lowdown shameful in the academic or professional world, with serious and often devastating consequences.More on this coming up, along with tips on how to avoid such shame and devastation. But first, let’s look a little closer at areas of intellectual property and property rights most relevant to you right now, as you finalize your Semester Project. CopyrightWhat is “copyright”? The United States Copyright Office defines copyright as “a form of protection grounded in the U.S. Constitution and granted by law for original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression” (“Copyright in general,” n.d., para.1). Copyright is further defined as “a form of intellectual property law” protecting both published and unpublished works, including “literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works, such as poetry, novels, movies, songs, computer software, and architecture”(“Copyright in general,” n.d., para.2). Original work is protected by copyright from the moment it is created and registration with the U.S. Copyright Office is not required. How does copyright differ from trademarks and patents? Basically, like this:?Copyright: protects original works of authorship?Patent: protects inventions or discoveries?Trademark: protects “words, phrases, symbols or designs” that identify a product or service (“Copyright in general,” n.d., para.3)Included as a clause in the U.S. Constitution in 1790 and updated to its modern form in 1976, copyright law also covers the translation of original work into other languages, the performance of copyrighted material (as with stage plays) and, most recently, the reproduction and re-broadcasting of audio/visual copyrighted material (Anyone remember Napster?)So … if everything you may ever want to use is pretty much already locked down and protected by copyright, does this mean you can’t use anything?No. You can. You just need to follow accepted protocols and give a shout-out to the original content creators whenever shout-outs are due. Here are two ways of using the works of others without pulling a Melania Trump and getting busted for not crediting your source.194Fair UseOne way to ethically use excerpts of copyrighted material without explicit permission or payment is through a doctrine known as “fair use.” As defined by the U.S. Copyright Office, fair use is “a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances” (“More information on fair use,” n.d., para.1).And just what are these “certain circumstances”? This is where fair use starts to get fairly sketchy. The U.S. Copyright Office cites as examples “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research” (“More information on fair use,” n.d., para.1). The sketchy part is that specific limitations or parameters are not clearly defined. Indeed, the Copyright Office has an entire website, the “Fair Use Index” -https://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html– that tracks judicial decisions litigating conflicts rising from the fair use doctrine, often due to disagreements over the certainty of these “circumstances.”So, what to do?To stay safe, follow these guidelines when considering using copyrighted material in a “fair use” application for your research project:1. Use sparingly. Don’t get greedy! Try to limit any verbatim (word-forword) use of copyrighted material to a single paragraph of written material or thirty seconds of audio/visual. Regardless of the length of a copyrighted work, never use the majority of the work under any circumstances, as this will certainly nullify your fair use protection. 2. Cite, cite, and cite some more. It is always better to over-cite than under-cite your sources. A good rule to follow is whenever you use any source of material you did not create yourself 100%, cite it. Correct and thorough citing of your sources, no matter how brief, will help you avoid that scourge of academic and professional research …Yes, you all know what’s coming now, right?That’s right. The “P” word.PlagiarismAt this point in our course, you should be pretty familiar with plagiarism and its consequences. In short, plagiarism is using someone else’s work without crediting the original creator of that work. This might be done explicitly (by claiming you created something you didn’t) or implicitly (but not saying you didn’t create it; therefore implying you did). Either way, this is considered plagiarism. And it’s bad. It’s very, very bad. As noted earlier in this chapter, growing up in today’s mashup culture can make it even more difficult to determine when to provide credit and acknowledgment, or even to realize when it is due. Doesn’t matter.In academic and professional settings, using the work of others without crediting them is still regarded as a major transgression, often with very serious consequences. And you can’t just say, as The Crystal Method once did, “I guess I didn’t know.”So, let’s look briefly at what can constitute plagiarism at school and in the workplace, its potential consequences, and steps you can take to avoid it all. Plagiarism at SchoolOne of the most common causes of plagiarism in school projects is the lack of effective time management. As we will talk about more later in this chapter, students who don’t budget and manage time efficiently often panic when faced suddenly with anoverwhelming amount of work and too little time to get it all done. In desperation, they turn to the internet (or even previous work of their own from other classes), producing a last-minute patchwork of plagiarized sources they hope their professor will not notice. News Flash! You. Professor. Will. Notice.It is pretty safe to assume your professor didn’t bounce off that turnip truck as it passed ASA and is very well-versed in spotting instances of plagiarism wherever they may appear in your work. In addition, plagiarism-identifying software such as Turnitin may be used by your professor to further vet and validate the originality of your work. In short: you plagiarize, you get busted. It’s that simple.So don’t do it! Plagiarism in the WorkplaceThe dark stain of plagiarism reaches beyond academia into the professional world as well. News stories regularly report individuals across a wide range of professions who clearly should have known better being called out for instances of plagiarism. Possibly the most well-known example of plagiarism in recent years occurred in 2016. Before an international television and internet-streaming audience of millions, future first lady Melania Trump addressed the Republican National Convention with a speech liberally plagiarized from former first lady Michelle Obama’s address to the Democratic National Convention eight years earlier (Scherer, 2016). Plagiarism plays no political party favorites. Former Vice President Joe Biden was forced to withdraw from the 1988 U.S. Presidential race after the New York Timesrevealed that Biden had “used five pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution” when writing as a law student years earlier in the Fordham Law Review (Dionne, 1987, para.8).Think the storied New York Times is immune to plagiarism? Think again. One of the most celebrated cases of professional plagiarism was uncovered in 2002 when Timesreporter Jayson Blair was revealed to have committed “widespread fabrication andplagiarism” in his reporting for the newspaper, creating “a profound betrayal of trust andJoe, feeling low No one likes getting ripped offa low point in the 152-year history” (Barry, Barstow, Glater, Liptak & Steinberg, 2003, para.1) of the Times on his way to “professional self-destruction” (Barry, et al, para. 4).Ouch. Consequences of PlagiarismAlthough “self-destruction” may seem an extreme consequence, instances of plagiarism in both academic and professional environments can have very severe repercussions. In school, plagiarized work will, at the minimum, result in a failing grade for the assignment and possibly the course. Repeated instances of plagiarism may result in suspension or expulsion from the institution. The ramifications of plagiarism in the professional world can be harsh as well. After his ouster, New York Times star reporter Jayson Blair never worked again as a professional journalist. His last known occupation was that of a “life coach” in Centreville, Virginia (Goose Creek, 2010).The consequences of plagiarism at the professional level are both wide-ranging and far-reaching. So far reaching, in fact, that many perpetrators, like Mr. Blair, never fully recover. Plagiarism can produce both ethical and legal aftershocks and employers often take severe and drastic steps to avoid being associated with known offenders, including career-ending termination. Those guilty of plagiarism often have difficulty in finding subsequent employment as they are shunned and avoided for being unethical and dishonest.In both academic and professional environments, being guilty of plagiarism provokes its own “scarlet letter.” Instead of Hawthorne’s “A”, however, the scarlet letter here is “P” – for PLAGIARISM.To sum up, you just don’t want to go there. And you don’t have to. How to Avoid PlagiarismA number of simple tools and approaches can help you avoid even the faintest whiff of dishonesty in your academic and professional work.Let’s look briefly at Research Methods’ most highly recommended tips to avoid plagiarism.?QuotingUsing the words of others is fine, but it is essential in plagiarism avoidance to give credit to the original source by enclosing any direct quote in quotation marks and including an in-text citation. An exception to the quotation rule is for longer quotes, those of 40 or more words, which are called “block quotes.”Say for example we want to use a longer direct quote from an outside source as part of our Semester Project on the tobacco industry’s marketing of electronic cigarettes to teenagers. Here is our full, direct quote from Chapter 9:A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) raises “The sound of an alarm” about marketing electronic cigarettes to adolescents, according to an Aug. 29 statement from members of Congress who wrote a report last year on the subject. The new CDC data show that the number of U.S. middle school and high school students who have tried e-cigarettes but not tobacco cigarettes tripled between 2011 and 2013, for an estimate of 260,000 young people(Rubin, 2014, p.1389).Block quotes are offset by an additional 0.5″ tab-in from the standard 1″ margin, and only include quotation marks if they are present in the original (see our example above).What if the overall quote is too long, or you just want to use parts of it? Not a problem. You can accomplish that this way:A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) raises “The sound of an alarm” about marketing electronic cigarettes to adolescents …[t]he new CDC data show that the number of U.S. middle school and high school students who have tried e-cigarettes but not tobacco cigarettes tripled between 2011 and 2013 … (Rubin, 2014, p.1389).Here, we have reduced the length of the quotation while remaining true to its overall meaning. Note that the edit point is indicated by the ellipses (the two sets of three dots made orange to stand out here) to alert the reader that we have edited the quote from the original. We also noted that we made a change to the original text by way of brackets “[]” indicating in this case that we changed an uppercase “T” at the beginning of a sentence in the original text to a lowercase “t” in our edit.All of this is fine as long as … Your edits don’t change the meaning of the original, complete quote!If you find the need to include any commentary or references within the direct quote, that’s OK, too, as long as you identify any added material within the direct quotation by [placing them within brackets, like this].?CitingCiting any source of outside material is also a good way to avoid plagiarism issues. As you can see in our example above, an in-text citation – that little trail of breadcrumbs – was provided for the quotation: (Rubin, 2014, p.1389).This directs the reader to the full citation on our Reference page that looks like this:Rubin, R. (2014). Marketing e-cigarettes to teens. Journal of the American Medical Association, 312(14), 1389. That’s it. You’re covered!Remember: When in doubt – cite!?ParaphrasingParaphrasing – summarizing or rephrasing the work of others in your own words is fine, as long as -1. You don’t change the meaning of the original.2. You provide an in-text citation crediting the original source, just as you would for a direct quote. For example, a paraphrase of our electronic cigarette block quote from above might read something like this:According to 2014 data from the Center for Disease Control, use of electronic cigarettes by U.S. middle and high school students tripled between the years 2011-2013 (Rubin, 2014).This allows you to condense and focus information to best suit your research project’s needs while staying true to the original source, and providing credit to its creators. ?Note TakingEffective notetaking is helpful in keeping track of intellectual property and who the original creators of source material is. As research projects build, time passes and material blends and merges, it can become increasingly difficult to remember “who thought of what when” and where original source credit belongs. Taking thorough notes as you move through the research process can pay off big time in Steps 4 and 5 of your projects, as you blend original and source material in your organizational phase and then credit your sources as needed. And finally …Time ManagementAs we noted briefly earlier in this chapter, one of the main causes of plagiarism is often just … running out of time. Students who don’t manage time effectively can find themselves facing a crushing amount of work with very little time to get it done in, especially at the end of the semester, when multiple projects from multiple classes all come due at once. This can cause a sense of being hopelessly overwhelmed, which can prompt a sense of panic, which can lead to a desperation dive into the internet and other sourcesto stitch together a last-minute copy/paste Frankenstein’s monster submitted in the blind hope your professor won’t notice. Trust us. Your professor will. (Remember that passing turnip truck!)To avoid this, plan ahead. Sit down in advance and work out a time budget, much as you would with your finances. Figure out how much time each project is likely to take, add in a bit of contingency to cover the unexpected, and allow yourself adequate time to produce a research project that is both exemplary and ethical. ?So, What Just Happened Here?In this chapter, you looked closely at the legal and ethical aspects of your research project and the importance of giving credit where credit is due. You learned how to identify intellectual property and when and how to cite the owners of any material included in your research that you did not create yourself 100%. You learned about the doctrine of “fair use” and what its ethical application and limits are. Finally, you confronted the scourge of plagiarism head-on and acquired new skills to help you avoid it.? Show What You KnowIn this week’s exercise, you will have the opportunity to identify instances of plagiarism and demonstrate actions you can take to avoid being branded with the “P” word. ? What’s NextIn Chapter 11, we’ll look at how you can stay safe and protect yourself in the wild and woolly information jungle, including keeping your electronic devices secure and your identity yours. ReflectionsStephen Glass, a journalist for The New Republic, was fired from his position because it was revealed that his articles, and their source material, were invented and falsified. How does this scenario illustrate the importance of the ethical use of information? This chapter has discussed the importance, and various protections of intellectual property, and provided concrete examples of plagiarism, which isn’t just a word, but serious crime with life-changing penalties.?????????????After reading Chapter 10 please define the following terms:?Intellectual Property?copyright ?fair use?plagiarism ___________________________________________________Arts & HumanitiesEnglishLiterature
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