IPR and Plagiarism...do you really know enough about them?

Picture taken from flickr.com

Having an English / American native speaker teacher gives you the possibility to know a lot about his / her culture. IPR and Plagiarism are part of the culture. I didn't know anything particular about IPR and Plagiarism, and one cause is Italian culture and the education system.

Right from the primary school the students are supposed to carry out some tasks without giving too much care to the information source. Therefore, the students won't never be able to select a reliable source and they won't never be able to avoid Plagiarism or to respect IPR.

This is one of the biggest fault in the Italian education system. Thus, and very often students need to be aware of a particular problem (i.e. IPR and Plagiarism) and they need to learn everything about it on their own.

During my school career I didn't learn a lot about this topic and I have never heard before the abbreviation IPR (even if I know something about Intellectual Rights). But I learnt something about copyright and the legal consequences. This course gave me the possibility to learn more, and above all, to think more about what I do with someone else's work. More specifically, Internet is a very useful tool, but a dangerous one if you cannot use it: if you copy and paste and use the material for your personal purposes without taking too much care, you are probably using Internet in the wrong way.

I think about every single time I took photos from websites and pasted them to my personal pages without writing references.

Now I feel quite afraid and I feel the necessity to write references or credits.

Thinking of being expelled from the University because you are accused of Plagiarism should make the students (in this case) more responsible for their work and that of other people.

I will surely search more material about this topic.

"Prevenire è meglio che curare"

(trans. "Preventing is better than curing")

Have a nice IPR and Plagiarism search...

Martina