Plagiarism, or copyright violation?

On Nov 6, 6:34 am, henri <he...@nowhere.com> wrote:

> The level of copying required for plagiarism is minimal.  In fact,
> it is possible to plagiarize using material which is not even copyrighted. 
> Use which would qualify as fair is often sufficient to sustain ethics
> charges concerning plagiarism.
>
> Plagiarism is not a category of copyright infringement, and copyright
> infringement is not a category of plagiarism.

Agreed.  I've always understood plagiarism, in an academic, literary or scientific context, to mean passing off someone else's words, ideas, or research, as one's own.  If you take a poem, frex, that may be public domain (either because it was written by "anonymous", or is an old writing whose copyright has expired), and submit it to your English teacher as your own work, that is plagiarism -- whether you change a few words around, or leave it as-is.   If you copy someone else's scientific data (a mere compilation, and hence not amenable to copyright protection) and pass it off as your own, that too is plagiarism.  As is inserting a snappy turn of phrase in your news article, without attribution of a source for the quote and hence making it seem to be the reporter's own choice of words, or stealing the plot of someone else's novel as a basis for your own without acknowledgement or attribution (ideas, per se, are not copyrightable - but may be subject to other kinds of intellectual property protection in some states, such as legal protection for a commercially valuable dramatic or literary character's name and appearance).

Plagiarism per se is AFAIK not legally actionable in any USA state.  It is a violation of academic, scientific or journalistic ethics and can be punished as such within its context, but is not a crime.

An act of plagiarism can, however, also happen to be an act of copyright infringement if the plagiarist uses copyrighted material in a manner that is not fair use, and passes it off as his own; the two concepts can overlap.   Perhaps that is where much of the confusion arises.

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