Plagiarism Editorial

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 of P50,000 to P150,000, if prosecuted under the law.
This law started when Sen. Vic Sotto’s careless acts of plagiarizing a speech from Robert Kennedy and from other U.S bloggers in a debate on new birth control legislation, and Sotto even said to his accusers that plagiarism is not a crime in the Philippines, despite of his support on the Cybercrime legislation. These acts have insulted the law makers and the Department of Justice.

 To protect our rights and credibility, we must be aware of this law. As we live in a generation of technological advancement and copy-pastes people, being wised up about this can protect us in our copycat nation we lived in.


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