Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Intellectual Creations
Many of the ethical issues that arise in the context of research are related to the
ownership of both ideas and descriptions of them. Loosely, these might be described
as
intellectual creations
,
1
that is, the stuff that knowledge workers make, including
concepts, inventions, discoveries, designs, documents (text, images, or video), or
code. People might own their intellectual creations, or the creations might belong to
their employer, or a publisher.
Some forms of intellectual creation have an established legal framework. Infor-
mally,
copyright
concerns the expression of ideas; that is, the words and pictures
used to say something are protected, but not the ideas themselves.
Patents
and
prior
invention
protect processes, inventions, and concepts; that is, the ideas, but not how
they are described.
2
When a researcher writes a paper, the content represents new
intellectual property, which may be patentable. The copyright in the form or presen-
tation is held by the author; typically, when the paper is published the author assigns
copyright to the publisher.
Thus the publisher owns the text, figures, and diagrams, and the author—or anyone
else—cannot legally use these again without the publisher's written permission.
Specifically, copyright prohibits use without permission of pictures and diagrams,
or of substantial volumes of text. Brief pieces of text can be used so long as they are
attributed, that is, quoted.
It follows that legal frameworks and ethical frameworks are very different from
each other. In law, plagiarism is usually infringement of copyright. In academia,
plagiarism is meant more broadly, to mean theft of any intellectual creation. Per-
haps confusingly, the ownership of intellectual creations in research papers is in
many circumstances not covered by law, while academic plagiarism does not always
involve infringement of copyright. Laws vary from country to country, while acad-
emic expectations are reasonably consistent internationally and across disciplines.
The academic community's standards—which are sometimes unstated—reach well
beyond what laws tend to require, and it is within these standards that academic
plagiarism should be understood.
Plagiarism
A central element of the process of science is that each paper is an original contri-
bution of new work. Scientists' reputations are built primarily on their papers: both
the work and how it is reported.
1
Or, more formally, intellectual property—a term with a great deal of legal baggage that means
different things in different contexts.
2
These are separate from the legal frameworks that concerns
fraud
and
misrepresentation
;these
protect the identity of individuals (among other things), and how the individual's identity is used.
