The effects of globalization and the internet is a troubling concept but even more so when we consider the issue of internet copyright and plagiarism. Signifyin’ Guyana explores the issue of copyright and considers “is it really theft if you steal it from a blog?” (The answer, I hope, is “NO” since this came from Guyanese blogger Charmaine Valere:)
What if you logged on to your favourite social networking site one day and discovered the talk was all about a brilliant newspaper article, and when you checked out the article it closely resembled something you had written online a few months prior? Would you just brush it aside and consider it mere coincidence? Given that general scenario, a rational thinking person would probably do just that . . . brush it aside . . . call it mere coincidence. But what if there’s more to the scenario?
Rules are changing about internet copyright and librarians have long recognized issues like net neutrality that affect academics and the public. It is no longer a question whether or not librarians have an obligation to play more of a role in helping users navigate this complicated world, but how they will do this. Even more so — how does one explain this to an increasingly globalized community which has different social customs and opinions on citations, quotes, pull-quotes, paraphrasing, source stealing and how to treat pulling images from websites. Is it enough to link to an article (thank you, Ian Shapira, for addressing this earlier this year) or should you use more traditional citation methods seen in scholarly research? Or is the reader’s expectation that determines the type of citation necessary? (i.e. academics expect it; media-hoppers and some bloggers don’t.)
So I ask – how do international internet copyright attitudes differ from each other and are they just as equal? Should we treat them as such?
