Using Information Ethically and Legally

How to use information ethically and legally

Ethics vs legality

• Most of the time, this distinction is explained as plagiarism vs copyright, but ethics extends far beyond just plagiarizing someone's content.
• Using information ethically means:

1. Ensuring that the conclusions you draw from your sources are true and accurate, not cherry-picked to prove a point
2. Attributing ideas to the folks who originated them if they are not your own (i.e., not plagiarizing)
3. Making sure you are not causing unintentional harm to other people, especially marginalized people, with your research

• Using information legally, on the other hand, means:

1. Adhering to copyright restrictions as determined by the law when using others' ideas or content in your work

Why does this difference matter?

• Because ethics and law are not the same thing. What is ethical is not always the law and what is the law is not always ethical. In the case of using the ideas of others in your research, acting ethically, meaning with honesty and integrity and an eye towards reducing harm, is of the utmost importance. It's important to practice producing highly ethical, principled writing that contributes to the global scholarly conversation. 
• Acting in accordance with copyright law is important to avoid getting in legal trouble. Copyright law is very complex and is constantly shifting, but it essentially breaks down to protecting ownership of "intellectual property," which can be anything from a book to a song to software code. Intellectual property can be owned by individuals or by businesses and copyright is supposed to protect intellectual property from being stolen or manipulated without the owner's consent.

What about Fair Use?

• Fair Use Doctrine, the idea that people can use parts of someone else's intellectual property for a few purposes, seems pretty simple to understand at first - if you're using someone else's content for analysis, using a small portion of a large work, not trying to make money off of someone else's work, etc., that content pretty obviously seems to fall under Fair Use. In practice, though, Fair Use is unevenly enforced and with large publishers of content having significant say in what violates their copyright, successfully arguing that your work is Fair Use can be a challenge. Some commonly-presented guidelines like "copying under 10% of a book is okay" have no basis in the law and as case law is constantly changing as more judges interpret the vague terms of copyright law differently, there are no hard and fast rules for what is acceptable.

Compliance with copyright law

• The easiest ways to avoid breaking copyright law are to ensure others' ideas are cited in your work (a case of something ethical also being the law) and to use as many open licensed materials as possible. When using something with a Creative Commons license or with an open access license, you can see exactly what the copyright restrictions are on that item and make sure you're following them closely. Some of these licenses allow reproduction and some allow adaptation.
• The next page in this guide contains more information about open licensing including sites that host open licensed content.

Comparing Copyrights, Patents and Trademarks

• Copyright is intended to protect content creators from having their work stolen or significantly changed without their approval. In an academic setting, it gives authors the ability to dictate how others can use their work and when, although big publishers can also demand that authors transfer their copyright to the publisher as a condition for publishing their content.
• Patents recognize new inventions derived from research. Patents can be expensive to obtain, especially patents for medical devices and drugs. Many of the same issues that apply to copyright also apply to patents since the cost and other requirements greatly favor large corporations or universities, which often stipulate as a condition of employment that any patents developed through employees' research is owned by the institution, not the employees.
• Trademarks are words, phrases, or designs owned by businesses. They are intended to create brand integrity so that when a consumer purchases an item branded with a company's logo, they know they are obtaining a genuine item. Trademarks can be lost over time if the trademark is genericized by the public and brands often walk a fine line between wanting to be a household name and wanting only their products to be considered as part of that household name.

Quoting vs. Paraphrasing

Quoting vs Paraphrasing: What's the Difference?

• There are two ways to integrate sources into your assignment: quoting directly or paraphrasing.
• Quoting is copying a selection from someone else's work, phrasing it exactly as it was originally written. When quoting place quotation marks (" ") around the selected passage to show where the quote begins and where it ends. Make sure to include an in-text citation. 
• Paraphrasing is used to show that you understand what the author wrote. You must reword the passage, expressing the ideas in your own words. Make sure to also include an in-text citation. 

Quoting - Example

• Parenthetical Style: Long-term unhoused people often experienced abuse and neglect in childhood since they "commonly come from families who are riddled with problems and marital disharmony" (Rokach, 2005, p. 477).
• Narrative Style: As Rokach (2005) notes, long-term unhoused people "often have no one to care for them and no one knows them intimately" (p. 477).

Paraphrasing - Example

• When you write information from a source in your own words, cite the source by adding an in-text citation at the end of the paraphrased portion as follows: Mother-infant attachment became a leading topic of developmental research following the publication of John Bowlby's studies (Hunt, 1993).
• If you refer to the author's name in a sentence you do not have to include the name again as part of your in-text citation, instead include the year of publication following their name: Hunt (1993) noted that mother-infant attachment became a leading topic of developmental research after the publication of John Bowlby's studies.

When is quoting or paraphrasing plagiarism?

• It's plagiarism to directly copy someone else's words without a citation.
• It's plagiarism to use someone else's ideas without a citation. 
  • This one's a little trickier! Sometimes there's a fine line between having your own ideas and having ideas that are heavily inspired by the work of others, especially since we don't always consciously remember which works influenced us. If you do have a source that states the ideas you're putting in your paper, it's always safer to cite that source than to assume it's a wholly original idea you came up with.
  • When writing a literature review, an introduction section, or anything else that relies heavily on the works of others, it's very common to include a citation for every (or just about every) sentence. Although this might look a little weird at first, it's the best way to make sure you're properly attributing ideas to the people who came up with them and people who read academic writing are very used to seeing many, many citations.
• "Common knowledge," or ideas that you could reasonably expect your audience to know, do not need to be cited. Everyone knows green means go, you don't need to cite the Department of Transportation on that one. But when in doubt, always cite! It's better to have extraneous citations you didn't really need than to accidentally plagiarize.