Coping with Copyright Violations and Plagiarism
in Scholastic Media Contests
JEA’s Board passed these recommended guidelines for copyright and plagiarism for local, state, regional and national contests at the spring San Francisco convention.The recommendations will also be presented to AEJMC's Scholastic Journalism Division group at its meeting in San Francisco in August.

Background:
Judges for state, regional and national scholastic media associations saw the problem begin with the line “photo compliments of the Internet” more than 10 years ago. Since then, access to digital information has grown enormously, and the problems it creates for scholastic media have, too. To address the legal and ethical implications head on, the Journalism Education Association and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s Scholastic Journalism Division have worked together to develop this two-part approach: (1) Educating media advisers and staffs about the issues involved and (2) offering model policy guidelines for scholastic media associations to deal with these issues in contests. To those ends, we propose the following:

Education:
• Scholastic press/media associations at all levels should make providing information about copyright and plagiarism a priority. This can be through newsletters, flyers in contest mailings, Web site instruction, etc. (NOTE: As a start, Source, the SJD division newsletter, will run an article and encourage SPAs to reprint it in their publications.)
• Scholastic press/media associations should also help advisers and students find alternatives to such practices. (i.e. To avoid print copyright infringement, suggest using local angles, searching FEMA or other governmental Web sites for material that can be used with proper crediting, or joining inexpensive suppliers like KRT-Campus; to avoid broadcast copyright violations, suggest appropriate licensing procedures, creating original music or using royalty-free music; to avoid plagiarism, properly attributing all material and using local sources)
• For another way of making clear to advisers and students what is legally and ethically unacceptable, scholastic press associations should provide clear explanations of what constitute competition violations and what the penalties will be.
• JEA and SJD will encourage the Student Press Law Center to ramp up the visibility of its copyright law information on its Web site and as part of future speaking engagements.

Model Judging Policies/Guideline:
The following are suggestions for each association to adapt as it chooses to address contest issues and help judges cope with problems when they find them.

• Copyright
Photos, art and other such visuals plus various forms of music — on the Internet and elsewhere — are copyrighted, even if they don’t include the copyright character, “„” and the owner’s name. Getting the owner’s permission to use such materials is important unless the material qualifies as Fair Use or is in the public domain. (see below)

Simply attributing work to its creator is not the same as receiving and indicating consent to publish or broadcast. Photos and art should be credited with “Photo used with permission of….” or a similar statement. Audio or visuals as part of a broadcast entered for competition should include a statement certifying it is original student work, used with written permission or is believed to qualify as a fair use or is in the public domain under copyright law.

Fair Use refers to the ability to print or broadcast materials that are copyrighted based on four factors: purpose and character of use (i.e. non-commercial use like news reporting, teaching or reviewing); nature of the work (e.g. factual work is more likely to fall under fair use than creative work, and published works are more likely to be used fairly than unpublished works); how much is used (i.e. looking at both quantity and quality of what is used; NOTE: There is no law stating music of less than 30 seconds is permissible to use.); and effect of the use on commercial value of the original.*

Use of apparently copyrighted materials without permission or a fair use argument as explained on the entry (e.g. photos from CNN.com or google.com or an artist’s soundtrack) will result in __________________________ (Options include disqualification from individual category competition, a lower rating/ranking in individual competition, disqualification of the overall publication if the infraction is common, lower rating/ranking of the overall publication, inability to earn top award, etc. SPAs can choose what each believes is best.)

• Plagiarism
This is not a legal issue but refers to the ethical situation of passing off someone else’s work as your own. That might be as unintentional as failing to attribute a quote to its source or as deliberate as submitting to a student publication a movie review downloaded from the Web.
Because codes of ethics for professional and scholastic press associations alike emphasize the need for journalists to be fair and honest in their reporting, we have no room for any hints of plagiarism in media.

However, student media is a learning experience. For that reason, this scholastic press association adheres to the following policy:
In individual category competition/critique, if a judge finds evidence of plagiarism in an entry, he or she may disqualify it if the copied material is extensive or may reduce the rating/ranking with an explanation noted if the material represents such problems as failure to attribute information.

In an overall publication critique, if the staff reports plagiarism when the publication is submitted for the critique/contest and indicates how the staff handled its discovery in an educationally positive way, the judge should ignore the specific plagiarized material and rate the publication as if it did not exist.

In an overall publication critique, if the staff does not find or report plagiarism but the judge finds evidence of it, the judge needs to _________________________ (deduct points, disqualify the entry, or….) and explain, with specific references, what the problem was. Judges should be clear in this description but non-offensive with comments. Generally the discovery of plagiarism is embarrassing to both staff and adviser, and it is enough to identify it. It’s not necessary to preach. Remember, however, high quality student work with a range of expert sources does not necessarily point to plagiarism.**

For both copyright and plagiarism:
In addition, a form should be attached to entries that includes the editor(s)’ and adviser’s signatures and the writer(s)’ or creator(s)’ signature if an individual category, affirming that the work is either original or has been used with permission (or in the case of broadcast media has been properly licensed) from any copyright owner.

* From The Student Media Guide to Copyright Law, „ 1998 Student Press Law Center. The SPLC Web site, http://www.splc.org, has a more thorough explanation.
** Adapted from Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s “Just for Judges Handbook,” 1983 and revised periodically by Edmund Sullivan, executive director.
Additional suggestions come from the Student Television Networks’ guidelines for network activities. Back