Person Steals the Property or Possession of

¶ … person steals the property or possession of another, the action is considered both a criminal and moral offense that if caught, the corresponding penalties are meted out. The matter is easily provable because what was taken is a tangible entity that provides solid proof of the usurpation. The issue becomes contentious when what has been stolen is intangible especially if these are original ideas, thoughts, designs and concepts.

This then comes under the purview of plagiarism, a well-known offense not only in the academic circles but in the milieus dealing with intellectual property rights and copyright.

Plagiarism should be differentiated from copyright though wherein "copyright is an area of civil and criminal law that prevents a series of uses of a qualifying creative work [while] plagiarism is a primarily ethical issue that centers around the dishonesty of claiming another's work as your own (Bailey, 2011)." Nonetheless, plagiarism at its plainest and simplest form is stealing another person's ideas or words and passing them off as one's own.

Plagiaristic actions can also be done in the following manners (iParadigms, LLC, 2011)." turning in someone else's work as your own copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit failing to put a quotation in quotation marks giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not (see our section on "fair use" rules) There may be counterarguments regarding the difficulty in ascertaining if someone indeed plagiarize a work or not because of the ubiquity of the usages and organization of words into information and production of ideas and concepts.

These are valid arguments; however, there are clear indicators regarding what constitutes plagiarism albeit there are times whereby an intensive analysis of the suspect plagiarized material needs to be done. Still, plagiarism is a common problems and it is especially prevalent in the academe. High-school students plagiarize significantly more than college students, according to several studies in which students are asked to 'self-report' copying (Hansen, 2003). Nevertheless, plagiarism is also rampant in various professions. As to why students plagiarize, there are varied reasons for doing so.

Foremost amongst the reasons are "to cope with the demands of studying and the pressure to get good grades. Financial problems were among also the most common reasons given for committing plagiarism. (Institute for Interactive Media and Learning, 2007)" The sorriest excuses though for committing plagiarism are the student's procrastination in doing the assigned work and laziness in performing the required work.

The end result is the tendency to 'cut-and-paste' in order to come up with the required assignment even if the contents of which are 'stolen from other sources.' Despite a clear identification of what constitutes plagiaristic acts, plagiarism can be intentional and unintentional. The latter basically is having clear and prior information and knowledge that ideas or works presented have been copied from another and presented as original or one's own.

Unintentional plagiarism of course is when the presenter of the idea or work never had any prior information or knowledge that what is being presented has already been done by someone else or is attributed to another person or entity. This is especially true when an idea has been deemed or supposed to be common knowledge. Common knowledge exists when a fact can be found in numerous places or is likely to be known by a lot of people (Thompson, 2008).

Thus, an unintentional plagiarism may take place when some common knowledge contains small details that should have been attributed to the original author. For instance, writing "President Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States" is common knowledge but if there is certain detailed information that can only be derived from other sources, then that is not considered as common knowledge anymore; thus need to be cited.

In order to not be guilty of plagiarism citing will need to be done for any and all information that originated from other sources. There are many ways to cite sources such as putting quotation marks on the item and including the source of the information. Paraphrasing is also done "to emphasize a particular idea or train of thought from the original author's text. Paraphrasing is acceptable but it is important to acknowledge the original author's ideas, even if it is has been substantially re-expressed.

(Thompson, 2008)" The rule of thumb with all these is that any idea, text or item that has been derived from whatever sources will need to be cited and acknowledged. The problem though is when over-citing occurs because the.