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Just to add a little to what Lauren has said, make sure you understand the difference between copyright and plagiarism. Copyright is the legal right to make a copy of the whole or parts of a work....
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#4: Attribution notice removed
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/28306 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/28306 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
Just to add a little to what Lauren has said, make sure you understand the difference between copyright and plagiarism. Copyright is the legal right to make a copy of the whole or parts of a work. Copyright automatically belongs to the person or organization that created the text, unless they sell it to someone else. Copyright holders can also licence some or all of their rights to others. Copyright law says that people can copy parts of copyrighted works for certain purposes, such as academic criticism. This is known as the fair use doctrine. In this case, the copyright holder has licensed further rights for individual non-commercial use. Plagiarism is the act of representing someone else's work as your own. If you acknowledge the source of your content, then it is not plagiarism. These are two independent concepts. If you copy more of a source than fair use or the licence granted by the owner allows, that is a copyright violation whether or not you cite your source. If, in an academic paper, you copy text from a work that the owner has licensed for public use, but do not cite your source, that is still plagiarism even though it is not a copyright violation. (But note that when the owner of a copyrighted work grants you a license to use it, one of the terms of that licence may be that your must attribute your source. In that case, failure to attribute it would constitute both plagiarism and a copyright violation.) Finally, note that most academic institutions expect you to do the work yourself. Copying from a source that is licensed for individual non-commercial use and citing that source means you have not violated copyright and you have not plagiarized, but you may still fail for not having actually done the work yourself.