Friday, March 12, 2010

Save Yourself From Plagiarist

Picture Credit : Plagiarism


First of all, what is plagiarist? From the Free Dictionary; plagiarist means someone who uses another person's words or ideas as if they were his own. In short, it is 'cut and paste' other's works such as essay, poem and even pictures and make it as their own ideas. And the worst part is, they are making money from others' hard work.

Why this is happening? Taken from ArticleBase; Darwin Redshield said that there are 5 top reasons why plagiarism happen. 
  1. They don't know what plagiarism is.
  2. They don't know how to properly use citations.
  3. Not thinking ahead - lack of time and resources.
  4. The internet makes it easy.
  5. They don't think they'll get caught.
(You can read the details here)

We already heard and some of you already encounter this problem. It's happening now and it is a serious matter! Imagine someone is making money out of it. You will feel very angry, isn't it? 

So, to prevent plagiarism, you can put html code in your website or blog for disable right click. This is to prevent people from copying your text. You can get the code from Brownielocks or you can still search it in Google.

To a certain extent, you can file for a lawsuit, meaning that you can sue that particular person. You can read Eddie Law's articles regarding the Internet law or you can read Elawyer.


A Note for Plagiarist

Let say you want to write something or maybe you want to share it with your readers but you are not expert in that particular topic. What you can do is that, you can quote the words and then you can credit that person's work or idea by mentioning their name/blog/website/etc in your site. 

You can even link that person's site in your post. Or maybe you can rewrite it back with your own words. But hence, it's still someone's idea. So, bare that in mind. 

2 comments:

excalade89 said...

Yet it's hard to tell either you plagiarize something or not. You might write out a sentence cited from Book A, and u accidentally hit something from Book B. You may get caught, but it's hard to tell, still.

Rabia Sensei said...

Victor, thanks for the comment.
Yup, it's true though. But at least we can try to minimize the error.