| Introduction
Setting the Stage: Some Questions to Think About
What constitutes plagiarism?
Who owns an idea?
Do you have an ethical obligation to always acknowledge when you use someon else’s ideas or words?
Do you have a legal obligation to do so?
Can plagiarism be unintentional?
Introduction
Ethical questions are about right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. Being able to make ethical choices comes from both understanding the values that are behind moral decisions, and from developing critical thinking skills. The aim of this module is to develop and encourage the process of critical thinking through consideration of the ethical dimensions within authorship, specifically through the example of alleged plagiarism in Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel Opal Mehta. The topics in this module are specifically related to the issues and ethics involved in questions of ownership of intellectual property rights.
Educational Objectives
By the end of this exercise/module, students will be better able to:
- Understand the concept of ownership of words and ideas
- Understand the concept of integrity in relation to the written word
- Understand the concept of appropriate acknowledgement of others’ words and ideas
- Understand questions of ownership of intellectual property
- Understand what constitutes plagiarism in a commercial and an academic setting in Western culture
- Know where to find out how to attribute sources correctly
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