Plagiarism Policy: Public and Private Property

Cite-Check: On Collaboration, Plagiarism, and Everything in Between
Introduction | Plagiarism Defined | Subtleties | Intellectual Boundaries
Public and Private Property | Hearing Your Voice | Traditions of Rhetoric | Think About Alternatives

The work we do in class, through groups and class discussion, is public intellectual property. These ideas are up for grabs because although others have helped form them, so have you and so they are in some part your ideas. The same is true for group work: everyone contributes to the idea that is created, so everyone owns it and can use it.

Private intellectual property involves ideas that you have had no part in creating and that are not available to everyone. When authors publish essays, they make their ideas public. You're free to work with them (we, in fact, ask you to work with them), but you need to acknowledge them through quotation and citation. Unlike the work you did in class, after all, you did not contribute to these ideas—they remain, in the end, private. In the same way, another student's paper is private intellectual property, even if you and the other student are writing from the same "public" class discussion. When that other student takes that public property and extends or transforms it, it becomes private. In general, private ideas are ideas that are not your own, writing you have not written, and words that are not part of your base of knowledge. If you use private intellectual property in your own work, then you've crossed the boundary, and you are plagiarizing.

How can you be sure you're not crossing that line? Listen to your voice. That's what we as teachers do.

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