Plagiarism
Closely associated with intellectual property – but slightly different – is plagiarism.
Closely associated with intellectual property – but slightly different – is plagiarism.
While youth actively participate in copying, with 95 percent of students in a 2017 survey admitting to participating in some sort of cheating,[i] they have trouble seeing their acts of plagiarism as having a victim. Ultimately, if nobody is hurt then we are unlikely to feel empathy and without that it’s hard to see something as being morally wrong.
First of all, you can’t choose to give up privilege – privilege is by definition an unearned advantage and you cannot choose to not have it. Guilt and shame are not, however, productive ways to deal with this.
One of the biggest ethical decisions young people have to make is how to handle other people’s personal information. Because nearly all of the services and platforms youth use online are networked, every time a friend or contact posts something they have to decide whether and how to share it. As well, youth may inadvertently share others’ personal information when posting their own content.
With younger children, the best approach is to have a clear and consistent set of rules, both at home and at school, about sharing other people’s content.
It’s important to make young people aware of the laws that apply to what they do online, as well as to have household rules that cover online behaviour.