Art 100W Tutorial: Skill #5

5. Understand plagiarism and use information legally and ethically
(make clear which ideas are yours and which are someone else's…don't use words or images in a way that violates the creator's rights to them)

Plagiarism means

quoting someone else's exact words without giving credit to the original author, or

using someone else's specific ideas even if you restate them in your own words

Citing your sources properly helps you avoid plagiarism.

See our Plagiarism page for more information.

Related concepts are:

Intellectual property

is the idea that something intangible--the product of a creative intellect--can belong to its creator just as a more tangible object can.

See Citing Sources & Intellectual Property

Trademark

a brand name, logo or design that identifies a product. It's registered by the maker and can't be used by others. Nor can anything too similar--McDonald's has sued many people who tried to use variations on their name.

See Basic Facts aboutTrademarks

See United States Patent & Trademark Office

Copyright

gives a creator exclusive rights to make copies of his or her own literary, musical or artistic work (or license it, or otherwise control its reproduction) for a specified period of time.

See Copyright & Art Issues

See United States Copyright Office

Fair use

makes exceptions to copyright by allowing some copies for educational use

See Fair Use of Copyrighted Materials

Public domain

is the status of something that was never copyrighted (the Mona Lisa) or for which the copyright has expired--which means it can be freely and legally copied. However, a particular photographer's image of the Mona Lisa can be copyrighted.

See Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States

Postmodern ideas of art can make all the above pretty tricky. Two concepts in particular can be problematic:

Appropriation

is "the practice of creating a new work by taking a pre-existing image from another context--art history, advertising, the media--and combining that appropriated image with new ones. Or, a well-known art work by someone else can be represented as the appropriator's own." This definition is from:

Atkins, Robert. Art Speak: A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords...

2nd ed. NY: Abbeville, 1997, pp. 47- 48. [King Reference 2nd Floor N 6490 .A87 1997]

Hommage

(usually applied to film) is the practice of making a reference, or allusion, to another film by putting in a sequence that is an obvious scene-by-scene reproduction of another filmmaker's characteristic or well-known work. Many of the elaborate fight sequences in Xena: Warrior Princess, for example, were hommages to Hong Kong martial arts movies. For other examples see the definition of hommage in:

Jackson, Kevin. The Language of Cinema.

NY: Routledge, 1998, p. 120. [King Reference 2nd Floor PN 1993.45 .J23 1998]

For some examples of how one person's hommage is another person's copyright violation, take a look at the "Visual" section of the Copyright Website (which is, you will note, copyrighted) for some examples, mostly from films. A well-known art example is the Jeff Koons sculpture "String of Puppies," based on a photograph Koons saw on a greeting card. The photographer sued for copyright infringement. A Federal court agreed with the photographer.

Some useful print references

Fishman, Stephen. The Public Domain: How To Find Copyright-free Writings, Music, Art & More.

Berkeley, CA: Nolo.com, 2001. [King Reference 2nd Floor KF 3022 .Z9 F57 2001]

________. The Copyright Handbook: How to Protect & Use Written Works.

7th ed. Berkeley, CA: Nolo, 2003 [King Reference 2nd Floor ]

Kenyon David. An Educator's Guide to Finding Resources in the Public Domain.

Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, ©1999. [King Reference 2nd Floor LB 1044.88 .P67 1999]. Also available as an eBook via San Jose Public Library)

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Comments and questions to Edith Crowe edith.crowe@sjsu.edu
Last Updated 17 September 2004
Created 10 February 2003