Freedom of Speech
Hungary vs. The United States

Graduate Student Scenario

Doris Kearns Goodwin Scenario

Introduction:

At an unnamed university, a graduate student (student A) had posted his resume to his website for employment-seeking purposes. Another graduate student at the same university saw student A's resume and liked the design so much, he downloaded a copy of it and modified the information to fit him while keeping the overall design identical. Shortly afterwards, Student A turned Student B into the Honor Court on the charge of plagiarism. By copying the format of the resume, did student B commit plagiarism or does he have the right to mimic the look and feel of the resume because it was publicly released onto the internet and without a copyright notice?

To test the extent of the differences in viewpoints of the United States and Hungary, a second scenario was added:

Author Doris Kearns Goodwin is accused of copying text from various books and including the text directly in her history books. When the first case of plagiarism was pointed out, it was quickly discovered that this was not he only time Goodwin has done this.


It is known that freedom of speech is an almost universal right, but where does the freedom of one person's speech begin to encroach on rights of the words already spoken by others?

Statement of Scenario:

Is this plagiarism?

(From a current case):

A graduate student (A) had created a home page with a link to his résumé for the purposes of (1) having a place where prospective employers could look for information, (2) as a location where it would be easy to make updates and corrections, and (3) as a site from which he would print copies as needed. Graduate student B, having open access to the home pages of his colleagues, examined the résumé of student A, liked what he saw, and downloaded a copy of the source document to his system. He then replaced all the information with his own, keeping nothing that was there before except the html tags. Student A turned student B into the Honor Court for alleged plagiarism. He pointed out that the format and layout of the second résumé was equivalent to his original, and even the background color (there was no graphical background) was the same.

Point: the résumé of student A did not include any "copyright" statement, though it did include a note about the person who created it and the date of the last update.

Comment: There may perhaps be a precedent in law to consider: In the 1980s there was a dispute between two developers of spreadsheets for personal computers. While there were some differences in operation, the visual look (and feel) of the two systems were very similar. In response to a claim of copyright infringement, the court found that "look and feel" were not within the bounds of copyright, and thus the case was dismissed. There was a similar case involving the patent rights over icons in a window. In that case it was also ruled that the concept (idea) of an icon could not be copyrighted or patented; only the actual icon was intellectual property. Take positions on the side of the Honor Court who would prosecute the case of Student B above and for his defense. Is he guilty of plagiarism? Is student B guilty of a non-ethical action?

Content taken from:
Professionalism Assignment #5 Scenarios

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