Plagiarism

I received a mail from pharmainfo.net the last week. It was in response to a mail I'd sent them because I'd had a problem including an image in a blog entry. They told me that it was because I was infringing on a copyright held by the owners of that image.

I felt terrible about that because I know copyright infringement is a very serious crime. I'd read a lot about it especially in the recent court cases ranging from Pfizer suing Ranbaxy for stealing a drug patent to Rajesh Roshan stealing music(Krazzy 4) to J.K.Rowling suing a publisher who tried to publish an unauthorised encyclopaedia to her work.

I quote from Wikipedia:

“Copyright infringement is a violation of the rights of the copyright holder, when material is used without the copyright holder's consent. On the other hand, plagiarism is concerned with the unearned increment to the plagiarizing author's reputation that is achieved through false claims of authorship.”

I think I can safely say that when anyone cheats in this competition, it comes under both copyright infringement and plagiarism. Plagiarism because there is “unearned increment to the plagiarizing author's reputation”, because of course, the best among us will win.

Many people also don’t seem to realise, and I quote this from plagiarism.org:
“The penalties for plagiarism can be surprisingly severe, ranging from failure of classes and expulsion from academic institutions to heavy fines and jail time! “

Online plagiarism detectors do exist and they’re very effective. The website plagiarism.org offers excellent suggestions and links to the same. These online detectors, I quote from Wikipedia:

“These software range from the basic comparison of two or more documents, to the more evolved versions allowing to find plagiarized sources on the Internet. They handle a number of document formats, the main ones being Word, PDF, and HTML.”

Plagiarism can be avoided to an extent by citing sources to which one has referred in his/her research.

Further information on plagiarism can be obtained on www.plagiarism.org

The only purpose of my blog entry is to bring this very serious fact to everyone’s attention. I was very impressed by the owners of pharmainfo.net mailing me to tell me not to infringe on any copyrights and I just hoped I could pass on the message to everyone else too.