6.5 Plagiarism

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As well as protecting economic rights, the Copyright Act 1968 also protects the moral rights of a creator.

Individual creators have moral rights (whether or not they own copyright) to:

• be attributed as the creator of their work
• not have their work falsely attributed
• not have their work treated in a derogatory way (Australian Copyright Council, 2005 p.2).

What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism is the act of presenting other people's words, ideas and creations as your own work. You are not presenting others words ideas and creations as your own if you acknowledge that they belong to others. Plagiarism can happen intentionally or unintentionally and is probably the most common form of academic misconduct.

Plagiarism may take a number of forms, including:

• using phrases or expressions by an author without acknowledgement
• copying from Web sites, books, articles, newspapers, magazines, plays, movies and speeches
• copying art work, photos, graphs, diagrams and music
• copying from another student
• using or developing ideas from another person's work
• failing to use quotation marks
• failing to summarise or paraphrase properly
• failure to reference properly.

Australian Copyright Council. (2005). Moral rights. Retrieved February 17, 2006, from http://www.copyright.org.au/publications/G043.pdf