Do not confuse plagiarism with copyright infringement[1]

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Plagiarism and copyright infringement

Today, the phenomenon of plagiarized literary, music and poetry[2] is appearing more and more and is being criticized by the society, public and academy. According to Vietnamese dictionaries, "plagiarism" means taking or basically taking someone else's work into one’s own[3]. The term "plagiarism" in English is defined more clearly, such as the Collins online dictionary defines “plagiarism is the practice of using or copying someone else's idea or work and pretending that you thought of it or created it”[4].

To combat plagiarism for the purpose of protecting the moral values, integrity and honesty of academics, some universities even issue their own plagiaristic definitions, namely “plagiarism means the intentional or unintended use, by academic authors, of sentences, paragraphs, articles, figures, images, information and ideas of scholars or other persons into their own production without citing, crediting or acknowledging the author of the content used”[5].

In the meantime, copyright is understood as the exclusive right protected by the laws for literary artistic and scientific works created or owned by a right holder, whereby any individual or organization without the permission of the right holder has exercised one of the practices, namely making reproduction, making derivative works, publication, distribution, or dissemination of that work, etc. are all considered as constituted copyright infringement, except for some special cases that the laws states as fair use[6]

Why “plagiarism” cannot replace with “copyright infringement” and vice versa?

As the joint point between plagiarism and copyright infringement is the appropriation, impersonation, copy, quotation, use of a work or a part of another's work but it is pretended to be his/her own, plagiarism and copyright infringement can be thus connected with each other or interplay each other. If so, why plagiarism is not available in legal provisions but only the term of copyright infringement is used instead? In addition to the biggest difference by nature (copyright only protects expression of idea not idea itself), the answer is because not all acts of copyright infringement are automatically considered as plagiarism or vice versa. The distinction between the two terms may be identified with some examples below:

1. Plagiarism found but does not infringe copyright. Assuming you do not credit the origin of the great poet Nguyen Du when using some sentences of poem from the Tale of Kieu, or on January 1, 2024 in case of no credit Walt Disney when using or copying the famous characters Mickey Mouse[7], you will be obviously not infringing copyright but will be considered plagiarizer.

2. Infringement of copyright but not plagiarism. You may need to utilize a variety of materials available on the internet including photographs (photographic works), graphic images (applied or visual art works), articles on the same topic that you are collecting for your commentary and you cited source of those works but your copying and use may still be considered copyright infringement because only the right holder has the exclusive right to make a copy or distribute the protected work.

3. Both infringing copyright and plagiarism. This situation often happens on personal forums, blogs, fan page or other social networks, eg. Facebook, Twitter wherein you copied, reused, shared or reposted other’s copyrighted work on your own site without permission nor citation. This behavior is considered as both plagiarism and copyright infringement.

4. Neither plagiarism nor copyright infringement. In the event that you use some short, reasonable quotations of other’s work without misrepresenting the author's views to serve the criticism or illustrate your literary criticism provided that such copied part of that work has been cited from a particular source then you are neither considered plagiarism nor copyright infringement. Of course, it is important to note that the citation itself can still constitute copyright infringement if the court or authorities find that the citation violates step 2 and step 3 of the three-step test[8] according to Article 9 (2) of the Berne Convention transposed into Article 25(1)&(2) of the Intellectual Property Law of Vietnam

5. Difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement may be summarized with the following table:

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