Copyright and plagiarism
Having encouraged you to read other people’s work and then write your own product, it has been suggested that I say a little about copyright and plagiarism.
Copyright law varies from country to country and frequently is complicated. The purpose of copyright law is to give creators of an original work the right to control the use of that work. The legislation also, in many cases, gives the creator the right to be identified as the author and to object to distortions of the work. Copyright usually lasts for between 50 and 100 years from the creator’s death. After that, the work is “public domain”, i.e., is available for anyone to use for any purpose.
Copyright applies to a range of work including written words, photographs, illustrations and computer programs. You cannot usually copyright names, titles and short phrases, but they may be trademarks. Under most jurisdictions, you cannot copyright ideas.
This means, if you wrote an original book, the actual content of the book would be protected, but your idea for the book would not be, so someone else could legally write their own book around the same idea, so long as they did not directly copy or adapt yours to do so.
Copyright is, in general, an automatic right and arises whenever an original work is created; whoever creates an original work owns the copyright to that work, unless they have agreed otherwise. The absence of a copyright statement or © symbol is irrelevant. Under most jurisdictions, it is an offence to copy or adapt the work without the consent of the copyright owner.
To avoid infringing copyright, you should never use or reproduce original material without first checking with the creator that this is acceptable. Creators may request payment for use of their material.
Plagiarism is the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work; it is not copyright infringement. Plagiarism is not illegal in most jurisdictions, but is frowned upon. In the academic world, it is viewed as “academic fraud”. In journalism, it is considered a breach of ethics. In both cases, the damage to reputation can be severe.
Internet marketers tend not to be so fussy, but I advise you to be careful – there is usually little to be lost in acknowledging the source of an idea.
