제 8 호 What is a Standard of Plagiarism?
Kicker: OPINION (PLAGIARISM)
What is a Standard of Plagiarism?
With Judicial Precedents and Cases
By Dong-Wook Kim, Editor
Recently, there has been a doubt on school community that the fleece design is plagiarized. One of the independent school’s logo has also been a controversial topic of plagiarism which made a lot of students to be concerned, and the whole school is interested about the standard of plagiarism. However, there are only doubts about plagiarism because it is too ambiguous to confirm to say that it is copied. What is the accurate standard to confirm that one has plagiarized? Let us have a look at the judicial precedents and cases about what plagiarism is.
The dictionary definition of a plagiarism is to use the other people’s creations without writing the source, so as to make the third parties recognize as if it were the plagiarist’s work. Partially using another person’s work or in a whole, modifying the other's creations, abusing the other person’s thoughts can be called plagiarism if done without mentioning sources.
Plagiarism is sometimes confused with copyright infringement. The reason why this happens is because they have an associative relation. The two concepts can come out at the same time when the person is abusing the other person’s workpiece. The difference between the two is that plagiarism is more focused on ethical concepts when the person uses another person’s work as if it is theirs. The creation can also be said to be plagiarized even when the original piece is not protected by the copyright laws. On the other hand, copyright infringement is close to legal issues, and this happens when the person uses the other person’s unauthorized creative work which is legally protected by copyright laws.
Generally, plagiarism and copyright infringement often share their concepts, but at the same time, they have a separate domain for each word. No matter how creative the idea is, we cannot say that the person has infringed copyright unless the concept and the ideas are expressed specifically. This is the reason that most of the plagiarists are not punished legally. In actual cases, most of the plagiarized creations have been sued to have legal responsibilities but they ended up guilty because plagiarisms are not treated to be a copyright infringement, a criminal act.
Somebody or other said that, “There is nothing new under the sun.” This implies that creating something can also mean reinterpreting an original creation. Is this a proper definition? Recently, there has been controversy on a group purchase of school fleece. The design of the fleece was the key point of the issue. One of the students who was in charge copied the former design of the fleece. Precisely, as you can see in the picture, the student imitated the design of another student’s deer logo just by drawing or deleting several lines. The representative student insisted that the original creation was a reference, but the creation looks almost the same. Furthermore, the design did not include any source even if they referred to the original, so the recreated design was sufficient to be suspected that it was plagiarized.
The Former Design of the Fleece and the New One
Fortunately, the plagiarized design was pointed out in the student community and the fleece was not mass produced for the group purchasers. Though the purpose of group purchase is not commercial nor profits, (not violating copyrights) the impact was enough to alarm the students of the copyright infringement.
Due to the fleece incident, the alarmed student pointed out a problem of another suspicious situation. The Student Council’s logo of the design college was brought up to the school community according to its similarity to an original piece of art. As burdens get bigger, the official design college posted a written apology with some explanation about the process of making the logo.
The Process of Student Council Designing their Logo
The apology started from the Council planning to design their logo. According to the apology, they said, “We tried to use an image of our Council name, Are-um, meaning a bunch of beautiful flowers blooming in our hands. However, the image was too complicated to use as a logo. In order to simplify it, we tried to compose a picture of a hand and flowers so that we tried to use papers to express a lot of shapes. During this process, we searched for some original pictures to refer to our design, but the result looks quite the same as a referred picture.”
Referenced Pictures that One of the Student Councils Used for the Final Logo
The incident can be interpreted differently according to one’s perspective. There are some students saying that just by examining the two similar logos, it can be obvious that the Council copied the picture from the internet. The lines and colors of the two creations look quite the same. However, the Council seems to explain the precise details on how they created their logo with some pictures during the creating. They also insisted that they are aware of the copyright issues and they did not intentionally plagiarize or copy the reference. Therefore, the Council has decided not to use the logo until the end of the term.
“Everyone steals in commerce and industry. I have stolen a lot, myself. But I know how to steal! They do not know how to steal.” This is a quote written by one of the most famous inventors, Thomas Edison. Is plagiarism a contribution to inventing new epoch-breaking things? Or is it just an excuse that unconscious people use? If it is the latter case, the act deserves moral criticisms.
Sources: http://edu.copykiller.com/edu-source/faq/?mod=document&uid=28
