Plagiarism & Fair Use

Copyright

• Copyright law gives content creators exclusive control over how their work is used, reproduced, displayed or adapted. Once you create original content--be it a book, a song, a painting or something else--you own the copyright on it. You don't need to register that copyright with the government, although doing so could help you in case of a dispute over ownership. The copyright exists at the moment of creation, and lasts for as long as you live, plus 70 years beyond that.
  
  

Fair Use

• The law makes some exceptions to copyright holders' exclusive rights. One of these is "fair use." You're allowed to use portions of copyrighted works under certain circumstances, such as for education, for commentary and criticism on the original material or for a parody of the copyrighted work. The law instructs courts to take four factors into consideration when deciding whether something is fair use: the purpose of the use, the nature of the original work, the amount of material used in relation to the overall size of the work and the effect of the use on the market for the original. A copyright holder who believes that a use of her work is not a fair use can sue for damages.
  
  

Plagiarism

• Plagiarism is the use of someone else's original material without crediting that person. Plagiarism can be intentional or unintentional. If you copy a poem, for example, and then publish it as your own, that's plagiarism. But if you use a verse of that poem to illustrate a point in a book without acknowledging the author, that's also plagiarism. Even if you credit the author of a work, you can still be guilty of plagiarism if you don't make it clear what words are yours and which are not. What defines plagiarism is not the motive, but the effect: You have taken someone else's work and made it look like your own.
  
  

Relation

• Plagiarism, once discovered, can be grounds for a fair-use lawsuit. By its very nature, plagiarism is not fair use because it can deprive the original creator of the benefits of authorship. If you're passing off someone else's work as your own, that means there's a market for that work and you're elbowing the original author out of a part of that market. It's also a serious ethical transgression. Few things can be as damning to a writer as an allegation of plagiarism.
  
  

Transfers

• Copyright holders are free to transfer their copyrights to others; to raise money, an author or songwriter may sell his copyrights to his books or songs. And in the case of "work for hire," the copyright belongs not to the person who created the work, but rather to the entity that commissioned the work and paid the creator for it. Newspaper reporters, for example, do not own the copyright on the articles they write. The newspaper owns those rights.
  
  These kind of situations can create a fair-use problem if a content creator recycles the same material he has used in an earlier context. He may believe that since the work originally sprung from his own mind, he can't be committing a copyright violation. But the work is no longer "his" at all; it belongs to the copyright holder, which can argue that the new use has harmed the market value of the original.