Plagiarism...

Everyone has been told the basics of plagiarism. It has been installed into our minds since elementary school that copying someone else's ideas or work is morally wrong. We are constantly reminded by teachers that we should always cite everything that we use in our papers in order to avoid this type of fraud, but it was not until recently that I discovered that there were several other things involved in plagiarism or copyright that I had never really considered to be wrong. Of course I knew the downloading music without paying for it was wrong, but I didn't know that it could literally be tracked down by the record companies and pin-pointed to the person who commited the crime. During the presentation that we had in class concerning copyright laws and such, I was given a direct example of this happening to several of the students here on campus. Lists were being released with their names on it, accusing them of illegal downloading, and now they were being asked to stop or suffer the consequences of a lawsuit. To me personally, the students were stealing, but they justified their reasons for doing this with the fact that everyone else was doing it. This of course is partly true, but the point here was that they were the ones that got caught, therefore taking the downfall for everyone else. To the recording companies, it is completely unfair to be robbed of something that they put time, money, and effort to create, so they wanted justice and to be recompensated for their losses. I believe that this is the only far thing to do, and it teaches people to not do the wrong thing. It reallys helps to know all of this information, because it could be the determing factor when you find yourself in a situation debating whether or not to ckick that download button.