Core Copyright

Last week, I addressed a common problem in which lawyers and non-lawyers conflate copyright and intellectual property (IP). In this post, I address another common confusion — the conflation of copyright (or copyright infringement) and plagiarism — and rationalize why I think being the subject of plagiarism allegations is much more damaging.

In order to distinguish copyright and plagiarism, it would be helpful to establish operative definitions for both concepts. I assiduously have avoided defining copyright thus far — I did not define copyright in the post on intellectual property — because I believe the term (and its defining parameters) should be defined carefully, particularly given the contemporary use of rhetoric and framing in this area of the law. Therefore, readers should consider as temporary the copyright definition I provide in this post, a placeholder I am using to complete this comparison. I will update this post later to reference the operative definition of copyright that we will be using throughout this publication.

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