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I was brought up to say please and thank you – for everything, no exceptions. At home, it was common courtesy to say: ‘Please may I have a drink?’ ‘Thank you for having me at your party.’ ‘May my friend borrow your book, please?’ ‘Please, is it OK for me to quote from your thesis?’ As I grew older, the thank yous extended to the courtesy of acknowledging authorship of quoted bits and pieces in essays, theses, journal articles and the like. Parents and schoolteachers saw to it that I learnt to do my own thinking, certainly drawing in part on other people’s theories and experiences, but expressed in my own words as far as possible, in academic pursuits and elsewhere.

In some cultures that are known to me personally, it has been common practice to copy the words of teachers and fellow students when it comes to answering examination questions. It’s not called ‘cheating’: it’s called ‘helping each other’. This is not the Australian way, however. While I was president of an independent examining body in commercial subjects, there were many occasions when the body had to work out a strategy for overcoming the ‘helping’ that was rife in some of the countries in which we examined. Students were desperate to get an Australian qualification by any means available. It took years of visiting these countries, but we finally succeeded, and students from those countries are now at the top of the list for receiving prizes for excellence in examinations – and not a hint of ‘helping’ anymore. Students excel on their own merit – not by copying from others without saying ‘thank you’.

If you’re old enough, you might remember what were called crib sheets – explanations of Shakespearean plays to help one understand the significance of the language or the intricacies of plots. We all used them and were grateful for them – but only as additional reference material, to be acknowledged in essays. There were ‘crib sheets’ in many school and university subjects.

‘Crib’ is a multi-defined word – the Macquarie Dictionary gives more than twenty meanings. In 2005 the meaning was ‘Colloquial to pilfer or steal, as a passage from an author’ [Macquarie dictionary, 4th edn, Macquarie University NSW, 2005]. The Macquarie dictionary online’s update to this definition in 2019 is ‘Colloquial to steal or plagiarise (a piece of writing etc.)’. The word ‘crib’ even made it into Kel Richards’s Word of the day on the 32 ABC’s Classic FM Breakfast on 6 June 2002: ‘Cribbing meant “an act of petty theft; or anything cribbed or taken without acknowledgment” from another’s work (plagiarism, in other words)’. See also Chat 10 ‘Editing students’ work’.

Ah, there it is again – the ‘p’ word. So what really is plagiarism? A good definition and explanation used to appear on the website of the Presbyterian Ladies’ College (PLC), Melbourne, describing plagiarism as ‘using other peoples’ [sic] words and ideas without clearly acknowledging the source of the information’. The University of New South Wales goes further:

Plagiarism … is using the words or ideas of others and passing them off as your own. Plagiarism is a type of intellectual theft.

[It] can take many forms, from deliberate cheating to accidentally copying from a source without acknowledgement.

[Source: ‘What is Plagiarism?’ https://student.unsw.edu.au/what-plagiarism (accessed 14 January 2019)]

In that last definition lies an important point: ‘accidentally copying’. It is perfectly possible for someone to have read something somewhere, absorbed it over time, and then included it in their own writing, as though it were their own. And the author can firmly believe that the writing truly is their own and that no acknowledgement is therefore necessary. I would have to say, however, that this could only possibly be true for short passages – maybe a phrase or a sentence.

Once, while tutoring at a university in Canberra and reading a student assignment on an aspect of linguistics, I was struck by how knowledgeable the student was on a certain point, until it dawned on me that the writing was my own! The student had copied, word for word, without acknowledgement, a passage of several paragraphs from my own thesis on the subject. The student was expelled from the course as this was the punishment for plagiarism at the time, regardless of how flattering it was to me to be quoted so freely.

Plagiarism on the grand scale has been made more and more tempting and easy for lazy students by people who provide whole essays on all manner of subjects on the web. Teachers and supervisors have to be more vigilant than ever to make sure that they are reading their students’ own work and not that of others. Plagiarism at academic levels can take many forms. The PLC Melbourne website used to list these examples:

 buying a paper or essay from a research service or online paper-mill

 handing in another person’s work with or without the author’s or creator’s knowledge 33

 copying an entire source and presenting it as your own

 copying sections from a source without appropriate acknowledgement

 paraphrasing material from a source without appropriate acknowledgement.

PLC offered teachers various ways of trying to prevent plagiarism, largely by being vigilant and prepared – visiting some of the sites where such material is available; including discussion of plagiarism in student study sessions; encouraging correct citation, rigorous research methods, and inclusion of a number of different resources in writing tasks.

In recent times, software has been developed to help students avoid accidental plagiarism and to help teachers and lecturers spot plagiarism in essays, theses and other academic assignments. I have no experience of using any of them, but suggest searching for ‘detecting plagiarism’ on your favourite search engine. Some programs cost money but some are free.

Of course, plagiarism is not restricted to students or academia. It can occur anywhere. However, it is possible to encourage good habits at student level, and this was my own practice in the Study Skills Unit at the Signadou (Canberra) campus of the Australian Catholic University in the mid 1990s. The aim was to prepare students for professional and commercial writing, and not just for university requirements. See more on plagiarism in Chat 10 ‘Editing students’ work’.

I have encountered confusion in the minds of some people recently about what is and is not in the ‘public domain’ and what that term means anyway. Unfortunately, there are people – including friends with lengthy academic, writing and even editing experience – who think it is OK to pass on emails to third parties without the permission of the author. The reason they have given has been: ‘It’s an email, therefore it’s in the public domain’. That is not true. An email is no more public in its intent than a letter written on paper and mailed through the post. And even material such as government information papers, while publicly available for free, still needs to be acknowledged if quoted. The same people have told me that they believe it is all right to print out and make multiple copies of fact sheets from websites. No it isn’t. If you read the fine print carefully, you will usually find a privacy statement, copyright information or other material that prevents copying more than once for personal reference purposes only.

This brings me to copyright. There are some excellent information sheets on the web, put out by the Australian Copyright Council and updated from time to time. The two main ones are:

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 ‘An Introduction to Copyright in Australia’: https://www.copyright.org.au/ACC_Prod/ACC/Information_Sheets/An_Introduction_to_Copyright_in_Australia.aspx

 ‘Duration of Copyright’: https://www.copyright.org.au/ACC_Prod/ACC/Information_Sheets/Duration_of_Copyright.aspx.

But there are many more, and you should consult them if you are in any doubt as to what copyright is all about. A good rule of thumb is to assume that someone owns the copyright on anything written, and that it’s not freely available until at least seventy years after the death of the author. Before that period is over, you have to seek the permission of the owner of the copyright before using anything, wherever in the world it has been written. In Australia, this all comes under the Copyright Act 1968. When copyright has expired, a work can be said to be ‘in the public domain’, not requiring permission to use it, but usually not until then.

So who owns copyright? Usually the author, and it’s automatic – as soon as something is written down or recorded, it is protected under the Act. It doesn’t have to be published, and you don’t have to use the word ‘Copyright’ or the symbol ©, though these are helpful if you need to let people know just who owns the copyright and that the material is protected. Sometimes, work is written as part of employment: in that case the employer owns the copyright. At other times it’s difficult to tell who owns the copyright: I own the copyright in all of the articles I have written for The Canberra editor, but when I wanted to republish adaptations of them in this collection of chats, it seemed to me to be courteous to seek the permission of the Canberra Society of Editors to do so and to acknowledge this permission in the book. Some of the original articles have been republished in other editing newsletters, such as Blue pencil in New South Wales and Book worm in Western Australia. Invariably, the editors of these newsletters have sought permission from me as author as well as from the editor of The Canberra editor. It’s just common courtesy.

So we’re back to courtesy – and really that’s what it’s all about. If you want to use other people’s writing, illustrations, website material, sound recordings, films – indeed, anything that doesn’t belong to you – just ask and then acknowledge the source in the text or in a bibliography or footnotes, using any clear method of citation or referencing. It’s easy to do. It’s no more difficult than saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.