You must know about Plagiarism if you are internet user.

What is Plagiarism?

You have seen that no one owns the Internet. Everyone can use and add information on this network. Suppose you have written a story and have put it in your web page for other people to read. What prevents someone from taking the story and getting it published in a magazine as his/her own? This brings us to an important issue how is a person’s work on the internet protected? What prevents others from using it? Copying another person’s work and presenting it as one’s own work has been done many a times by different people, this act is known as plagiarism.
People of all ages, working in different areas have been known to indulge in acts of plagiarism. The coming of the internet has made it easier to indulge in plagiarism. It is a bigger issue today than before.
Plagiarism is unethical. It is punishable under the copyright law. This lad recognizes that any creative work prepared by an individual whether it is in the form of written text, a painting, composed music, video a computer program or in any other form, is the property of the person who has prepared it. This is just like saying that a car or a flat bought by you is your property. No other person has the right to use the work without the permission of the person who has prepared it.
Plagiarism is an unscrupulous method and is being done by more and more people today. Why do people plagiarize? There are multiple reasons for this.

• Sheer pressure of work leads to plagiarism. For example, students are not taught the value of proper time management. When the time comes to submit a project, a student may not have enough time to do his or her own research. With the internet, he or she now has easy access to another people’s work on the same topic. They simply sit down on a computer and gets on to the internet and searches for the project topics. Within some minutes they find hundreds of contents related to the topics. They just copy the most appropriate information and presents it as them own work to the teacher.
• It is possible for a student to do this since various projects and papers are regularly posted by people from all over the world on the internet. Posting on the internet means making information available to all also means that information is regularly getting added to this already vast reservoir.
• People also indulge in plagiarism when they are not confident about their own ability to research on a topic.
• People are often not even aware that they are actually copying other’s work and that this is wrong. This is especially true when they copy paragraphs from multiple sources and put them all together as their own work.

Avoiding plagiarism

• You need to be aware that plagiarism is wrong. It is like cheating or robbing another person. You take your friends’ pen and say that is yours. You know that it is a wrong thing to do. Similarly, copying work done by others is wrong.
• You can use another people’s work in your project provided you get the author’s permission to do so. Credit should be given to the author, by mentioning the source of the information and the name of the author, in the project. This may either be done in a bibliography at the end, or the information can be put in quotes within the project, giving the authors name. Even if you are unable to contact the author, or if no reply is received to your request, always give credit to the author.
• You must understand that there is information available on the internet, which is free for anyone to use. The authors have made it for public use and awareness. These may be facts that are common knowledge, data that they want o share with everyone or even computer software that the author wants the public to use freely. Often such information or computer program has a public domain, notice saying that the information can be freely copied.