Did you know?

• Copyright in the United States was established in the Constitution.
• You can violate copyright even if you don't sell the copies you have made.
• Your own work is protected by copyright even if you don't give copyright notification and don't register your work with the Library of Congress.

Copyright law in the United States is designed to play two public interests against each other to promote the development of knowledge and culture.

It first protects the right of an author or creator to profit and benefit from original work, providing an incentive to do that work. Among scholars this benefit comes from receiving credit for one's work and thus building a reputation.

Then second, the law provides reasonable access to the work, so that others can build on that work and further advance knowledge. This access comes through particular limitations on copyright, including fair use, which allows the quotation of small bits of a work for purposes of criticism and scholarship.

Fair use for students means that:

• you can make one copy of a printed work for personal study,
• you can quote and paraphrase someone else's work in your own writing as long as you give credit to the original author and also as long as your quotations are brief.

Academic Honesty

To present someone else's work or ideas as your own is dishonest, and in extreme cases, illegal. This kind of dishonesty is called plagiarism. The university takes cases of plagiarism very seriously and allows academic penalties for it, including a failing grade for the course in which the plagiarism occurred.

College Policy on Intellectual Integrity

But at the same time it is very easy to protect yourself against plagiarism. All you have to do is give credit to the sources that you used. Giving proper credit will also boost your credibility in the eyes of your professor, since this demonstrates that you have read and understood the required material, and also demonstrates that you are learning how to read and write in your professor's subject discipline.

Giving full credit to a source requires two things:

• A reference in your paper where you use the borrowed information.
• A bibliographic description or citation of the source at the end of your paper.