How to Borrow from Other Authors’ Works without Plagiarizing: Rules for Using Intellectual Property

Do you know that you will have to ask permission if you plan to illustrate your material, article or speech with a photo of the famous «Gioconda»?

It is important to know the rules for using intellectual property not only for publishers or textbook developers, but also for teachers who create their own study programs, place publicatinos in online media or participate in the development of learning materials.

Tetiana Kharlamova, Head of the Educational Literature Unit of the UIED and Expert of the Learning Together Project, told us about copyright protection. You will read in this article about the following:

• what is copyright and what are copyright types;
• what should guide an author of learning materials, publisher and expert;
• what are the most common violations in the Ukrainian practice;
• how to avoid mistakes when borrowing information from other sources.

As the expert notes, copyright is a set of rights that belong to the author as a result of the creation and use of a work of literature, science, art, etc. An intellectual property right appears at the time of creation of the material and belongs to its author. The author is considered to be a person whose name is indicated as the author on the original, unless it is proven otherwise (this is a presumption of authorship).

There is no need to immediately register copyrights or make them official, there is no need to perform any formalities – this can be done at any time during the period of their protection (during the author’s life and 70 years after his or her death). However, it should be borne in mind that copyright protection applies only to the form of expression of the work, but not to ideas, principles, methods, procedures, processes, systems, methods, concepts, discoveries, etc., even if they are mentioned in the author’s work.

Copyright is divided into two types – individual and proprietary. Individual right arises at the moment when the author completes working on his or her work. This right is not alienated and will always belong to the author. As well as the right to dispose of the work – to publish or not to publish it, to publish it under own name or pseudonym, etc.

Proprietary copyright can be sold or transferred for free use (as in the case of learning materials that authors create at the expense of government funds). And then the right to dispose of such work will belong to the one to whom the property rights have been transferred.

The most common violations

The expert considers plagiarism as the most common copyright violation in Ukraine. The law «On Copyright and Related Rights» defines this phenomenon as «promulgation (publication), in whole or in part, of someone else’s work under the name of a person who is not the author of this work.»

Plagiarism can take the form of:

• publishing someone else’s work on own behalf;
• verbatim copying of the work in whole or in part without arranging the copied text as quotes with reference to the author of the original text;
• copying the material and making minor changes to it (reformulating sentences, replacing individual words or their order, etc.) without specifying authorship;
• paraphrasing: «The paraphrase may or may not be plagiarism,» says Tetiana Kharlamova. – «It is plagiarism, when you take an original idea from someone else’s work, retell it in your own words, but do not write that this idea belongs to a particular author. When you mention the author and his or her work, where this original idea is presented, the paraphrase ceases to be plagiarism»;
• compilating. «We know a lot of scandals in the Ukrainian scientific space, when several fragments copied from various works and sources were connected only by general sentences in order to mask the traces of copying. The author and the original work were not specified. This is an absolute plagiarism. However, if the author does not present such text as his own text and indicates sources, he works within the legal framework».

The expert notes that all developers of learning materials should adhere to the principles of academic integrity.

Compliance with the norms of academic integrity, among other things, provides for mandatory reference to primary sources of information, compliance with copyright and related rights, and provision of reliable information in scientific, research and teaching activities.

How to avoid copyright infringement when borrowing information

Copyright belongs to the author during his or her lifetime and his or her heirs for another 70 years after author’s death. Then the work becomes a public property. So, the use of the work in full (and sometimes in part) is possible with the consent of the author or his or her heirs.

However, there are exceptions:

• quotes;
• use of text fragments as an illustration of a thought, idea or information in the work of another author, if this work is of the educational nature.

This means that the authors of any learning content (courses, training sessions, textbooks, manuals, online platforms) have the right to use any author’s materials without copyright holder’s consent. The only strict condition is the mandatory indication of the author’s name and the name of the original work as well as the source of borrowing (the name of the publication or site from which the fragment was copied), if any.

Even more nuances of using other people’s works and protecting intellectual property appear during the creation of online training platforms and resources, if no due attention is paid to the verification of information.

Ukrainian legislation, Tetiana notes, defines the public domain as «works and objects of related rights, the term of validity of copyright or related rights to which have expired», and no legal entity or individual can have exclusive property rights related to them.

But there is a caveat. If, for example, a textbook contains a photo of a famous work of art that has already become public domain (for example, Leonardo da Vinci’s «Gioconda»), it is worth remembering that the photographer who has taken this particular photo may have copyright. And then the reference to the source of borrowing will play a significant role.

There are a lot of open, commercial and shareware sites with photos and videos. As a rule, they indicate the terms of use (for example, some photos can be used for educational purposes, but it is forbidden to use them in advertising, others are allowed to be published without restrictions, but with the mention of the author and source, etc.).

«This is a significant search effort,» says Tetiana Kharlamova, «which takes a lot of time that publishers of learning literature are usually short of.»

However, the illustrative material should be checked at least with the help of Google, which makes it possible to find the original source of the uploaded image in a few clicks.

The list of references must be issued in both electronic and paper publications, and digital resources must also be added there.

This material has been prepared for the Learning Together project and published on the NUS portal following the results of the Autumn School for Creators of Modern Educational Materials carried out by the Learning Together project + the EU project at the end of 2021.

This document was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union or the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland.