Digital Intellectual Property - Essay Example

Digital intellectual property is a type of intellectual property, which is somewhat more technical and information technology oriented. Some of the most common digital intellectual property issues include plagiarism, reverse engineering, open source code, competitive intelligence, and cyber squatting. In this paper, we will discuss plagiarism, which is one of the most common digital intellectual property issues. Plagiarism In the simplest form, plagiarism means to use someone’s idea, conversation, writing, or any other thing without using the reference of that person.

Plagiarism is not only associated with the act of copying someone’s written work or oral speeches without mentioning the source but also it is associated with all types of visual art works, music, and paintings. “A painting that is a direct copy of someone else’s work without permission is also plagiarism when the work is presented as one’s own” (Ellis-Christensen, n.d.). There are a number of ethical issues related to plagiarism, which make it one of the most common issues all over the world.

“Plagiarism violates the law as well as individual moral codes” (Jorgensen, n.d.). . 5). My personal point of view regarding the issue of plagiarism is that it is an act of copying and cheating which is totally against the creativity ethics. Rozakis (2007) states, “Plagiarism is a serious lapse in ethics as well as a cause for failure” (p. 118). Here, I would like to relate a personal experience in which my professor caught me for the act of plagiarism. My professor gave me an assignment in which I had to write a one-page paper on some topic of my interest.

I wrote the paper on discrimination and submitted it to the professor. Unfortunately, the professor gave me no marks for the paper as he caught some plagiarism in that paper. Actually, I copied a couple of paragraphs from a website and tried to write them in my own words. My professor discouraged my act and asked me that I should have mentioned the source even for paraphrasing. Although I lost my marks in that assignment but I got some new information about plagiarism that one should not closely paraphrase two large paragraphs without mentioning the source.

Some people say that paraphrasing is one of the ways to avoid plagiarism. However, if someone does paraphrasing of a small paragraph or a quotation, which is very close to the original version, it is also a form of plagiarism. “Paraphrasing someone else’s work too closely is another form of plagiarism” (Ellis-Christensen, n.d.). Plagiarism is cheating which cannot be tolerated in any case. Submitting someone else’s work as one’s own, doing close paraphrasing, not documenting the references properly, or copying personal work are such actions which do not find any base in the ethics of creative works.

Some people use copyrighted work available on the internet