The Editorials

Alleged "UP Oblation" Plagiarism               We are fascinated by the Oblation concrete statue of the Filipino Artist Guillermo E. Tolentino whenever we went to the University of the Philippines, this masculine icon that symbolizes selfless offering of oneself had engrossed all people for countless of years. But while his feminine accomplice, faces controversy and disputation of the artist’s work for its first exhibition to the public. The Filipino artist Ferdinand Cacnio’s the “UPLift” sculpture, or also known as the “Female Oblation”, had 2,000 shares, over 12,000 reactions and negative comments on social media for the alleged plagiarism of the work of the Dutch artist Elisabeth Stienstra’s “The Virgins of Apeldoorn”, first accused by a netizen.                 The controversy started on June 24, Sunday, after the Filipino artist Cacnio posted on his Facebook account on June 23, a netize...

Criminalizing Plagiarists Plagiarism and its consequences is not just a matter of personal, professional, ethical and legal concerns, it is also a matter of jail. Our generation’s technology may now stumble on plagiarists like a bat out of hell. With the availability of plagiarism detection software, plagiarists were being caught in alarming rate, and in the law there are no excuses to different people plagiarizing someone’s intellectual property.  The Philippines Cybercrime Prevention Act (RA 1075) is an effective law code against plagiarists. With it, our country instituted criminal penalties for a variety of online acts, including spamming, identity theft and ordinarily, libel. This law adds penalties to said “special laws” under the country’s legal code, specifically under the copyright law of the Intellectual Property Code. The word plagiarism itself cannot be criminalized, but the copyright infringement is. Which would carry a punishment of 3-6 years in prison and a fine...