Attribution: the ascribing of a work or an idea to a particular author or artist

Citation: the act of directly quoting or giving intellectual credit to another person's work or ideas

Collaboration: to work together especially in a joint intellectual effort

Copyright: the legal right granted to an author, composer, playwright, publisher, or distributor to exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution of a literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work.

Copyright is the legal protection of literary, dramatic, artistic, and musical works, sound recordings, performances, and communication signals. Copyright provides creators with the legal right to be paid for -- and to control the use of -- their creations. Copyright also provides exceptions to the rights of creators for users, like educational institutions, who want access to material protected by copyright. A balance is achieved by providing creators with legal "rights" and then limiting those rights through "exceptions." Copyright protects only the way information is expressed, not the information itself. Copying ideas, facts, or information in your own words is not copyright infringement, but may nonetheless constitute plagiarism (A Guide to Copyrights 3).

Common Knowledge: can be defined as facts known by a large number of people. These "facts" do not have to be cited. For a printable handout discussing common knowledge, please click Handouts for Students.

Cyber-Plagiarism: copying or downloading in part, or in their entirety, articles or research papers found on the Internet or copying ideas found on the Web and not giving proper attribution.

Deliberate Plagiarism: Waltman describes intentional plagiarism as "the wholesale copying of another's paper with the intention of representing it as one's own" (Lathrop and Foss 163). In addition, the definition of deliberate or intentional plagiarism includes the theft of another person's ideas.

Fair Dealing: the use of copyrighted material in such a way that it does not infringe on the copyright of that material. The Copyright Act provides that "any fair dealing" with a work for the purposes of private study or research, or for criticism, review, or news reporting is not an infringement. However, in the case of criticism, review, or news reporting, the user is required to give the source and the author's, performer's, sound recording maker's or broadcaster's name if known (A Guide to Copyrights 6).

Infringement: a copyright gives one the sole rights to produce or reproduce one's work through publication, performance and so on, or to authorize such activities by others. Anyone who engages in such activities without permission is infringing on the copyright holder's rights.

One specific form of infringement is plagiarism. This is copying someone else's work and claiming it as one's own (A Guide to Copyrights 5).

Intellectual Property: a form of a creative endeavor that that can be protected through a copyright, trademark, patent, industrial design or integrated circuit topography (A Guide to Copyrights 19).

Paraphrasing: 1. a restatement of a text or passage in another form or other words, often to clarify meaning.
2. The restatement of texts in other words as a studying or teaching device.

Paper Mill: a term applied to providers of pre-written term papers and other "educational tools" via the Internet. Some web sites offer thousands of papers online.

Plagiarize: to steal or pass off as one's own (the idea or words of another); use (a created production) without crediting the source; to commit literary theft; present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source (Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, p. 1728).

Public Domain: a work in the public domain is free for everyone to use without asking for permission or paying royalties. The phrase "public domain" is a copyright term referring to works that belong to the public. Works can be in the public domain for a variety of reasons: because the term of copyright protection has expired; because the work was not eligible for copyright protection in the first place; or because the copyright owner has given the copyright in the work to the public domain. The owner must specifically license all or certain uses of the work. This is done by stating on the work what uses are permitted such as, for example, that the work may be reproduced, communicated, or performed for educational purposes without permission or payment (A Guide to Copyrights 5).

Unintentional Plagiarism: can be described as "careless paraphrasing and citing of source material such that improper or misleading credit is given" (Waltman qtd. in Lathrop and Foss 163).

Information on this plagiarism website used and adapted with permission from the University of Alberta Libraries Learning Services.