What are non-original ideas and text?

For the final project you must provide an Acknowledgments page to account for non-original ideas and text used on your site. The definition of non-original is simple: this is work you did not create.

To avoid copyright violations—not to say plagiarism—you cannot copy any material from any source on the Web or otherwise without permission and without giving credit, if you have permission, on the page where the material is used.

This means that you cannot cut and paste any text without permission; otherwise this is a copyright violation. If you did copy material, and tried to do it without attributing it to its proper source, this would be plagiarism, which is not allowed in this course or at this University (see Policies). But is is sufficient to be a copyright violation to simply copy without permission.

For clarification on whether you have to register to have copyright protection (you don't), see Do I have to register with your office to be protected? in the US Copyright Office's Frequently Asked Questions. For clarification about getting permission to use someone else's work see How do I get permission to use somebody else's work?. To see how you could be sued for using someone else's work without permission, see Could I be sued for using somebody else's work? How about quotes or samples? To see why we use the form of copyright notice that we do in this course see Form of Notice.

The easiest way to avoid any problems with ideas and text is to use your own ideas and write about them in your own words. Your project grade depends on the content you create, so it would be unwise to rely on other material anyway.

With any scholarly or academic exercise, though, you may want to use ideas or material from other sources. Here is where you should cite sources, enclosed short non-original text in quotation marks, paraphrase with citation to the source, etc. These methods are nothing more than standard ways of creating content based on the work of others.

Failure to follow the guidelines for non-original ideas and text for this project will result in a severe grade penalty. Plagiarism itself will result in failure for the course.