Intellectual Property Rights and Student Plagiarism free essay sample

Google search of the words â€Å"write my essay for me† provides the searcher with over sixty-eight million results. Sixty-eight million options for a student to not have to write their paper. Sixty-eight millions options for a student to essentially pay their way through an essay. If those numbers aren’t scary enough, many people do not realize the extent of copyright laws and so those students or individuals who are just â€Å"borrowing† sentences and expressed ideas from other authors are inherently plagiarizing. The world has changed a lot in the last 20 years, to the extent where we now have a global interface that can tell us stories, facts, show us movies, television shows, music, and introduce us to ideas and thoughts in literally the blink of an eye. The internet has been one of the most important and influential ideas, inventions, revolutions, whatever someone choose to call it etc, of human kind’s history. We will write a custom essay sample on Intellectual Property Rights and Student Plagiarism or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page It can also be one of the most dangerous and destructive inventions of recent years, especially in how parents raise their children. In today’s world, where everything the Internet rules over everything, especially in the lives of the younger generations, what are the new implications of intellectual property rights, of plagiarism, and how do we protect authors’ works and prevent plagiarism from happening? We must first go into the root of the problem: the tricky definitions of the ideas of the 21st century. One of the most important ideas, whether it be philosophy, economical or simply ethics, is the idea of intellectual property rights, which in the encompassing term for copyright, patent, trademark laws, and trade secrets. Essentially, intellectual properties are the intangible rights that every human can possible create, such as music, art, film, ideas, written and spoken, inventions and discoveries to name a few. It is actually a relatively new idea, only coming into existence in the late 18th century and only being named â€Å"intellectual property rights† in the 19th century. Even then, the idea did not become mainstream until the mid 20th Century. It is also part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and as author Ayn Rand has stated about the importance of these rights, she simply states that the human mind is a giant source of wealth and ideas and to ignore intellectual property rights is just as problematic as ignoring other property rights. And thus, the argument over whether intellectual property is the same as physical property still rages on. In the pre-internet world, plagiarism was actually fairly simple. If an individual, specifically a student, were to write an essay and take a few passages out of a book they were reading and use those passages in their essay, without citing the source, that is plagiarism, plain and simple. Unfortunately, in today’s internet world, plagiarism is not as simple as it used to be. Of course, there is still the one side of plagiarism, where someone takes parts of another author’s work and presents it as their own, however, how do you distinguish what is a truly original written piece on the internet to begin with? This is the age of blogs, where people can simply write their opinions and maybe some facts in a post and then â€Å"publish† that on their blog. Does that count fully as a written work that is completely protected by the United States’ copyright laws? Does the incredibly popular â€Å"memebase† site have copyright over the commentating pictures users create? Does a Facebook status or a tweet count as a written work? The difficulty of trying to rationalize protection of every single post of the internet as original work under the United States’ copyright laws, is that it is impossible. The internet is too huge to try to protect everything; and before people start claiming this as â€Å"too cynical†, why not just try to protect the most important written aspects of the internet? Protect the online books and journals, the scientific and literary articles, written by professionals, scientists, and newspaper reporters. However, that brings up an entirely new question: how do we determine what has actual literary, scientific, artistic and ideal value? It turns into a giant subjective maze of peoples’ opinions and â€Å"facts†, that may or may not even be protected under normal copyright law. Gone are the obvious choices in the real world to protect, where the blog world has made it so that we cannot truly determine what has value and what does not. Take the Huffington Post, for example. What started as a simple blog turned into one of the most influential political sites online. No one eight years ago would have predicted its influence nor could they. That is the next important piece of the puzzle: the internet is an incredible new technology, and like all technology, it changes rapidly. Furthermore, new technologies are also usually not completely understood and therefore, we cannot fathom how much more advanced it will become or how much of a tool it will be used as. Which brings me to my next point, the internet as a tool. The internet can be a wonderful technology in the classroom. Students can look up random information very quickly, teachers can show their students an important video that relates to the class and students can use articles online to copy into their paper. Unfortunately, students have became lazier in recent years, and a new trend, that coincides with the advent of myspace and facebook, shows that students’ writing skills are getting poorer and poorer. And NPR has stated recent trends show that the internet has returned humans to a â€Å"natural state of distractedness†. And, with classroom and school expectations getting higher and higher, the motive for plagiarizing becomes more and more concrete. However, teachers can help their students keep away from plagiarizing and hopefully, help those students to become better writers. First of all, teachers can try to have as much in-class writing sessions as possible and when writing outside essays, keep the topics more specific to what is going on in the classroom. Teachers give essays with very broad topics because they want to students to have more freedom with their essays. With a little compromise, teachers can achieve freedom for their students but also cut down on the plagiarizing. Teachers can also use the internet as a tool against plagiarizing, as well. There are sites that teachers can use to determine if the text from a certain essay has been copied. Most important of all, is the fact that we also need to simply educate students more and more about what plagiarism is and help out those students who tend to fall to it. Cyberspace has become a tool to make cheating easier and easier but it can also be a tool to stop it. It falls upon all of our shoulders to prevent plagiarism. And hopefully, with a little help and education, we can reduce, if not even eliminate the epidemic.