Blog 5 of Wangqian Huang

In the OSU online plagiarism tutorial, there are two interesting questions about plagiarism. The first one is question four, which is talking about whether you will be committed plagiarism if you use someone’s idea from a discussing group without citing. Another is question eight, which is discussing whether you will be regarded as plagiarism if you cut and paste an interesting article from internet to your posting. For question four, I think the correct answer is yes because other people’s ideas belong to their intellectual property, so if you want to use their idea, you need to cite it. Also, in question eight, I believe this situation should be considered as plagiarism, because you don’t have right to directly use other people’s article without citing.

After I chose answer, I found out that we could use other people’s idea without citing in a group because we could share the idea in a group. Furthermore, some people do not regard ideas as intellectual property because it does not write down, but some people think it is really serious of using other people’s idea. As a result, we should be careful to use it. Moreover, cutting and pasting is a way of internet to attract reader’s attention, so it is hard to say whether it is wrong or right of falling into plagiarism. As far as I am concerned I think this question is quite interesting because in college discussing and sharing idea in college is a common phenomenon. We will easily fall into this problem if we do not pay attention on it. Therefore, it reminds us to be careful to use other people’s idea. I suggest that college students should keep what is plagiarism in their mind, and be careful to get involved into it.