Pride and Privacy!

Your Rights to Rights

With information so readily available at the simple click of a button, it becomes easy to just spear-head your way through without stopping to consider that information, like most things, is protected. This is for the simple fact that people exhaust every effort to procure sound, credible information that can be used to further develop or enhance various aspects of life and the world as we know it. It becomes unfair, when others simply click a button, download a document and attach their name to it, taking credit where credit's not due.

...So how do we protect intellectual property?

Copyright and Creative Commons

Copyright: According to Harrod's Librarians' Glossary (2000) copyright refers to the procedure whereby original pieces of work also called intellectual property, including but not limited to books, music, and articles, are assigned a series of rights that prevent the unauthorized publishing, editing, broadcasting, etc of that work by anyone other than the creator of that work. Copyrights remains in place for the entire lifetime of the creator, plus an additional 50 years thereafter. Copyrights expire after the additional 50 year period is reached, in which case the work then becomes open to the public and is entered into public domain.

Creative commons: This refers to licensing by a non-profit organisation enabling the free and legal distribution of work that are otherwise copyrighted http://creativecommons.org/.

In a nutshell...

Knowledge is created to be shared, and used by others for personal insight and further development. however, we need to be careful when reproducing information and ensure that sources are correctly acknowledged by citing works that are not your own and referencing them so that they can be verified. This is especially important for us as students and current or future researchers to be aware of so that we do not end up being perpetrators of intellectual theft (plagiarism).

Open Access