300 word discussion - Choose 1 below

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Plagiarism is presenting someone else's words as your own. In college, this often takes the form of students copying information or large chunks of text from a resource source and not properly documenting that source. It can also involve students copying a paper that was obtained from another student or an online source. Effects on students can range from a zero on a paper to expulsion.

In the business world, copying the images or words of another company can be much more serious and can result in lawsuits and job losses. This is referred to as copyright infringement, and it is illegal even if something does not appear to be copyrighted.

In business, copyright infringement, can take the form of using images owned by others without getting written permission from the author or owner. This may occur when someone designs a brochure, pamphlet, or presentation. It can also occur when someone uses information and images from well-known books or another company's documents or website and uses them for their own training programs, corporate policies and handbooks, and marketing material. Even making copies of a magazine article and circulating them around the office is copyright infringement and almost certainly breaks "fair use" laws. Unfortunately, copyright infringement has become more common with the advent of technology and the internet where images and documents are easily "pirated" by a simple click of a mouse.

"Fair use" refers to special rules that allow people to use copyrighted images for very special and limited purposes. For example, college instructors may copy limited numbers of a document and during a very limited time period for one-time classroom use. This sometimes leads students to believe that they can do the same thing in a business, but there is a big difference legally and ethically between use by instructors in a classroom and copying something to make money.

For example, I worked for many years in business designing and developing training programs and marketing material, I had to be very careful not to use material I found in books or journals without getting written permission from the owner. In fact, when I produced a customer newsletter, I was once accused of plagiarism by an angry corporate customer. The customer had been to a conference and had heard a presentation that included much of the material that was in an article written by one of our engineers that I had published. He made a very angry call "reporting" this to my manager and threatening to notify his own management with whom we were doing a lot of business. My manager was able to calm him down and explain that our company was the originator and copyright owner and had given the presenter permission to use some of the material in his presentation, but it could have turned out very badly for all of us.

A big problem was when someone would attend a training session we presented, take the training manual back to his or her office, and then reproduce the manual to present training to his coworkers! However, that was stealing. To develop that training program, we had spent thousands of dollars on industry experts and had had internal graphic artists spend many hours producing professional-quality tables, charts, and images of machinery and processes. We also sometimes purchased stock photos to use in our training materials at hundreds of dollars each. Our materials were a substantial investment that we did not appreciate having stolen. I once even had an attendee ask for a copy of my PowerPoint presentation for a technical writing course I was teaching!

More commonly than stealing training materials is the use of images and photos taken from the internet and used in company brochures, advertisements, and presentations. Sometimes people in business copy images from electronic sources to make presentations look better. Often the thought is that if they are just using the presentation for an internal meeting, it does not count as copyright infringement because they really aren't "making money off it." And once in while, someone steals a photo from an online source, and it shows up in major advertising! It has not even been unknown for someone to take photos from social media and use them for business purposes, and then a parent finds a photo of his child in a magazine! This has really happened.

Now, as you consider the possibilities of your vacation photos appearing in an advertisement, read the two resource articles describing copyright infringement in business documents.