I got invited this week to talk in an IT educators conference about copyright and plagiarism. It is an interesting topic as most Filipinos today are one way or another guilty about copyright violation. Here�s a snippet from the book DigitalFilipino.com E-Commerce Workshop E-Book which I hope can be useful in enlightening readers like you on this topic.

Back in 1997 to 1998, I was guilty of violating other people�s copyright. In various mailing lists then, I can be found posting full articles from various news websites which I believe can be relevant to my mailing list community.

I would even copy and paste advises or tips from other sites to my email messages making it appear of my own without referring to the source. This act is also known as plagiarism.

However, in latter part of 1998, a foreign journalist greatly criticized my actions via private email explaining how much income that I�m depriving them, user traffic that should go in their site. In another community, an Internet user took the effort of humiliating me by posting the original e-mail where I based my message board posting. I fought hard on that for I believe that I could have been confronted privately instead. With great shame, I truly learned my lesson about copyright the hard way.

As I started my own DigitalFilipino.com website, I realized that one should take the effort of guarding one�s online content. Four years ago, a special sections editor requested to reprint my article featuring an interview of former President Joseph Estrada on the subject of e-commerce. As no compensation is being offered for the reprint, I requested that my DigitalFilipino book be featured. The request was rejected resulting to no publication of the article request. After a week, I was given a copy of the said special section newspaper with an article that has statistical information without credit to my website. It also appeared that I was interviewed as well for that article, even though I�m not. The quotes were all based from the articles I�ve written. A few told me that such can be considered as fair use while others think that it is a copyright violation. Regardless, I didn�t felt good about it. That goes the same to my opinion, posted in my discussion group, and got forwarded to another mailing list without my consent.

I realized how important copyright was when my intellectual property was violated.

Guidelines in using online information

When writing your report and using published resources, make sure that you quote the article title, writer, date and name of publication. Otherwise, you may end up violating somebody else's copyright. In the real world, if I published an article in a magazine or newspaper, depending on the arrangement with the publisher, copyright can be owned solely by the author or co-owned with the publisher. That is why it is best to write to the editor when asking for copyright permission.

There is the concept of "fair use" in the copyright law. Quoting from an article and mentioning the author's name and where it was published is an example of fair use. But republishing an entire article, even if the author's name, source and entity of publication is mentioned, without getting the approval of the owner(s), is a clear violation of copyright. The same goes when posting an article in a discussion group.

Remember that the copyright law in the real world is also applicable to the virtual world. There are a lot of people who are guilty of copyright violation and/or plagiarism -- I am not an exception to that. More often than not, you�ll realize how important copyright protection is, once your own copyright is violated.

Copyright violation takes place everyday, not only with printed work but also with music, video, software, research work, among others. Of these violations, the publisher and the author's rights are completely ignored, altogether. Even though some people may claim that the Internet is already pervasive, such does not justify why one should commit copyright violation.

Copyright laws were created to protect the rights of the creators of original work -- and this stands regardless the existence of compensation. Most of the abusers even make more money than the original creators themselves. If copyright is not taken seriously, this will hamper the growth of e-commerce and innovation in the country.

Although one may argue that if a website owner violates the copyright of another website or "original work", owned by an individual from another part of the world, they can't sue you unless they have the resources to hire lawyers who will protect their rights. That may be true, but website owners and Internet users must learn, understand, and respect copyright in order to foster peaceful co-existence and innovation in the World Wide Web.

Get yourself familiar with the Intellectual Property Code and Copyright laws of your country. Visit the Philippines Intellectual Property Code for more info about it.