By Robert Johnson
Managing editor

One of the seven Army values is integrity.  The idea is that every Soldier should do what’s right — morally and legally.  Theft is something that a person living the Army values would never consider, and yet, we see breeches in integrity almost daily.

The theft isn’t car jacking, embezzlement or shoplifting (although way too much of that goes on), but it’s intellectual theft, or more accurately, intellectual fraud.

When you write something and decide to cut and paste a few comments from Internet sources, you really are stealing — and not just morally. Plagiarism is the stealing of someone else’s words and passing them off as your own, and it’s against the law.

The Internet has made it almost too easy to steal a good idea or image (yep, photos, graphics and cartoons are covered, too.) You need a quote, figure or image to add to your writing, presentation or flyer and a quick Google search will give you thousands of possibilities. Click here, right click there and — presto — you’ve added that photo to your PowerPoint presentation and earned yourself the possibility of up to one year in jail.




    

Do you have to put it in writing to get in trouble with the Internet and copyright laws?

Not hardly. Another favorite pastime of a lot of GIs is the downloading of music. While most of the downloading is quite legal through P2P sites, or person-to-person download software such as iMesh, eD2k or BitTorrent, these same software sites can also be host to illegal uploads and the music industry is getting more aggressive going after those that share free music.

Joel Tenenbaum from Boston found out just how aggressive the music industry would be protecting copyrights. Tenebaum was fined $675,000, in a federal court, in August, for his download of illegal music. The fine was roughly $22,500 for each song infraction.

The problem is most of these works are copyrighted material and your “cut and paste” technique of penmanship puts your integrity in question. The worst part is that most written phrases, paragraphs, articles and recordings can be used legally and honestly. You simply have to put a little more effort into your final product than a few mouse clicks.

One way is to paraphrase the selected passage. That’s putting the text into your own words and not just changing a few verbs here and there in the original writing. Plus, you need to give proper credit to who or where you gained this information.

Are all things copyrighted? No, they are not. Most work produced for the government isn’t copyright protected, but that doesn’t mean that everything produced by the government is up for grabs. And it doesn’t have to have the funny little © sign either. All original work, even ideas, produced today are considered intellectual property and protected for the life of the owner, plus 70 years.

While it’s easy to paraphrase and make writings your own, the same cannot be true for photographs and recordings. Altered photographs are still considered part of the original.

The best way to avoid plagiarism problems is to just make it your own without the cut and paste.