Friday, February 24, 2012

Plagiarism; a Trap in Freelancing


Image Courtesy: Google

No one likes to be a kidnapper, if the chances of getting money are as open and adventurous as that in a freelancer’s life. No one likes to be a terrorist by choice, if the principles of life are as alluring as that of a freelancer’s; believe, write, live. Plagiarism, is not usually a choice, it is a trap.

Every artist or writer knows how important it is to create a new product; the importance of this awareness is equal to that of the conviction not to steal. No one likes stealing, until or unless it becomes the only option. Plagiarism is stealing of a work—intellectual property—or in academic terms, the unacknowledged copying of a writing or work of art.

It is either ignorance or the lack of care that causes the unacknowledged copying of materials. This can be harnessed if one keeps a check list for the editing of the final draft. You can very well control whether all the sources are mentioned in the written work; an article or content for websites. If a check list can help this situation, there is another, the first case, where one copies another’s work for the lack of another option, and keeps it a secret.

Here is the question of deadlines and choices and the moral responsibility. Deadlines often do good for a freelancer, but at a certain period in every freelancer’s life, he or she tends to yield to the pressure of meeting deadlines in the most easiest of ways, and one cannot attribute it to anything else other than to human limitation. An average freelancer will get ample writing opportunities and therefore finds it difficult to provide the content within the prescribed time. This forces him to copy from someone else’s work, without acknowledgment.

Here, as I mentioned above, preventions and cure should work on a moral ground, since it is out of choice one does it. Often, it is easy to capture the copied work using software help. But of course, the best way is to avoid the trouble of inviting one.     

3 comments:

A said...

Stealing someone else's work is... STEALING!

Anu Lal said...

Thank you Agnes. You are so right!

DEBAJYOTI said...

nice write up.