Intellectual Property Law's Plagiarism Fallacy

Abstract

Intellectual property law is caught in a widespread debate over whether it should serve incentive or natural rights objectives, and what the best means for achieving those ends are. This article reports a series of experiments revealing that these debates are actually orthogonal to how most users and many creators understand intellectual property law. The most common perception of intellectual property among the American public is that intellectual property law is designed to prevent plagiarism.The plagiarism fallacy in intellectual property law is not an innocuous misperception. This fallacy likely helps explain pervasive illegal infringing activity on the Internet, common dismissal of copyright warnings, and other previously puzzling behavior. The received wisdom has been that the public is ethically dismissive or indifferent towards intellectual property rights. This research reveals instead that experts have failed to comprehend what the public's conception of intellectual property law actually is.The studies reported here uncover several additional intellectual property law findings, including that (1) the majority of the American public views intellectual property rights as too broad and too

Intuitive intellectual property law: A nationally-representative test of the plagiarism fallacy

“…Likely because people view plagiarism as the primary legal concern in the re-use of creative works, they appear to believe that attribution to the original source of material reduces culpability for its re-use. Mandel and colleagues [ 1 ] first demonstrated this effect. They presented 443 mTurk participants with a series of vignettes in which one person (User) re-used, without permission, material first created by someone else (Creator).…”

“…Thus it appears that the video posters seem to believe that citing the original source of the copyrighted material, in combination with a statement that this poster is not the copyright holder, somehow reduces or eliminates the video poster’s culpability for copyright infringement. However, in the United States and most countries, this behavior is often illegal [ 1 ]. It appears that hundreds of thousands of YouTube posters have a different viewpoint about the most basic tenets of copyright law.…”

“…Past work has used the term plagiarism fallacy to refer to a set of beliefs held by American adults that suggest they have major concerns with plagiarism. That is, they believe plagiarism concerns underlie U.S. IP protection and that remediation of IP infringement is possible through, amongst other things, attribution of credit [ 1 ]. These beliefs are considered to be a fallacy because lawmakers and legal experts do not consider plagiarism concerns to be a basis for intellectual property protection and IP laws generally do not permit use of others’ creative works simply by providing attribution [ 2 – 4 ].…”

“…In one study, Mandel, Fast, and Olson (see Study 2 [ 1 ]) presented 116 adults recruited through Amazon mechanical Turk with four possible justifications for IP protection—the three views widely identified by legal experts and scholars to actually underlie IP protection in the U.S. (incentives, natural rights, and expressive rights)—along with an alternative justification—to prevent plagiarism. Inconsistent with the actual law and viewpoints of IP law experts, but consistent with the plagiarism fallacy , plagiarism was the most widely endorsed reason for IP protection.…”

“…Yet, importantly, in the U.S., attribution does not make re-use any more legal. In fact, all of the scenarios presented to participants in the work of Mandel, Fast, and Olson [ 1 ] would constitute intellectual property infringement under U.S. IP law. Thus, past work suggests a very clear disconnect between the actual U.S. copyright and patent law and lay people’s intuitions about these laws.…”