By Bria Loyd & Antoinette Hatcher

 What is copyright?  Does the public have rights to download music, pictures, and written work?  What is plagiarism?  How can it be avoided?  Why is it important?  If the software is for a school project, can I use it?  If a site doesn’t have the word copyright or the copyright symbol on its page can I still use it?  How do you know when something is copyrighted?  What is attribution?  Is it important?  How is it related to copyright?

 Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights it, usually for a limited time. Generally, it is "the right to copy", but also gives the copyright holder the right to be credited for the work, to determine who may adapt the work to other forms, who may perform the work, who may financially benefit from it, and other, related rights.

 Copyright law tries to give balance to the rights of artists and others with the rights of the public.  Fair use protects the rights of public to limit use of copyrighted materials.

 Plagiarism is stealing somebody's work or idea  The process of copying another person's idea or written work and claiming it as original.

 To avoid plagiarism, you must give credit whenever you use  another person’s idea, opinion, or theory;  any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings—any pieces of information—that are not common knowledge;  quotations of another person’s actual spoken or written words; or  paraphrase of another person’s spoken or written words.

 In college courses, we are continually engaged with other people’s ideas: we read them in texts, hear them in lecture, discuss them in class, and incorporate them into our own writing. As a result, it is very important that we give credit where it is due. Plagiarism is using others’ ideas and words without clearly acknowledging the source of that information.

 Because a site doesn’t have either the word or the symbol,it don’t mean that the information isn't copyrighted.  Just about everything on the web is copyrighted.

 Not all works can be copyrighted. Titles, names, short phrases, ideas, methods and concepts cannot be copyrighted. Works composed entirely of common-property information with no original authorship also cannot be copyrighted.  For an original work to be copyrighted, it must be fixed in either print or a form that is communicated with a machine or device. This includes literary works, musical works, pictures, movies, audio recordings and software.

 the ascribing of something to somebody or something, e.g. a work of art to a specific artist or circumstances to a specific cause

 Attribution becomes even more powerful when expanded across other channels such as display, Face book, and mobile. Cross- channel attribution enables advertisers to define the optimal media mix, which helps in creating consistent messaging to optimize cross-channel performance.

 Attribution in copyright law, is the requirement to acknowledge or credit the author of a work which is used or appears in another work. Attribution is required by most copyright and copy left licenses, such as the GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons licenses.  Attribution is often considered the most basic of requirements made by a license, as it allows an author to accumulate a positive reputation that partially repays their work and prevents others from claiming fraudulently to have produced the work. It is widely regarded as a sign of decency and respect to acknowledge the creator by giving him/her credit for the work.