Study Skills

Study Skills, Plagiarism and Copyright

Study Skills

What are Study Skills?

Study skills are the skills you need to enable you to study and learn efficiently. 

What are the Key points of Study Skills?

Develop your own personal approach to study and learning in a way that meets your own individual needs. As you develop your study skills you will discover what works for you and what doesn't.

Study Skills are not subject specific- They are general skills that can be used throughout all study areas. Understanding the concepts, theories and ideas surrounding your area is necessary to specific subject areas. 

You need to practice and develop your study skills. Developing the skills enables you to to study with more awareness, and eventually you'll become more confident in studying as you develop the skills. Study skills are beneficial throughout your life.

Study Skills are not just for students- Study skills are transferrable. They will be taken through from education into new contexts. for example, organisational skills, time management, prioritising, learning how to analyse, problem solving, and the self discipline that is required to remain motivated. Study skills relate closely to the skills employers look for.

Types of Study Skills:

There are 7 types of study skills:

-Visual: Learning through imagery and understanding

-Aural: Learning through listening, sound, and music

-Verbal: Learning through speech and writing

-Physical: Learning through hands-on, tactile interaction

-Logical: Learning through logic, reasoning, and system

-Social: Preference for learning in groups, or working with other people

-Solitary: Preference for learning alone via self-study

Plagiarism

What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism is the practice of taking someone else's work and passing it off as one's own, to use without crediting the source, committing literary theft, or to present something as new and original an idea or product taken from an existing source. 

Plagiarism with images, videos and music:

Using an image, video or piece of music in a work you have produced without receiving proper permission or providing appropriate citation is plagiarism. It is very common in todays society, but is still plagiarism. This includes:

-Copying media (especially images) from other websites and using them in your own work

-Making a video using footage from others' videos or using copyrighted music as part of the soundtrack

-Performing another person's copyrighted work (i.e., playing a cover)

- Composing a piece of music that borrows from another composition.

With this in mind, however, these types of media can also be difficult to determine as to whether copyright laws have been infringed or not. Below are some examples that are not seen as plagiarism:

-A photograph or scan of a copyrighted image (for example, using a photograph of a book cover to represent the book on a website)

-Recording audio or video in which copyrighted music or video is playing n the background

-Re-creating a visual work in the same media (for example, shooting a photograph that uses the same composition and subject matter as another)

-Re-creating a visual work in different media (for example: making a painting that closely resembles someones photograph)

-Re-mixing or altering an image, video or audio, even if done so in an original way. 

Cases of Plagiarism:

Joe Biden- Was forced to withdraw from th 1988 presidential race on the counts of plagiarism. He had taken speeches from British politician, Niel Kinnock, who was running against Margaret Thatcher for Prime Minister. 

Alex Haley- The Author of Roots was taken to court by Harold Courlander, the author of The African, who claimed that Haley had lifted work from his book into his novel Roots.

Vladimir Putin- He was accused of plagiarism when his theses Strategic Planning of the Reproduction of the Mineral Resource Base of a Region Under Conditions of the Formation of Market Rlations  was discovered to have exact lines from a 1978 textbook written by two University of Pittsburg professors. 

Copyright:

What is Copyright?

Copyright is the exclusive and assignable legal right given to the originator for a fixed number of years, to print, publish, perform, film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material.

Copyright protects you work and stops others from using it without your permission. 

You get copyright protection when:

-You create original literary, dramatic, musical and other artistic work, including photography and illustration.

-You create sound and music recording

-You create non-original written work, such as software, web content, and databases

-You create film or television recordings

-You create broadcasts

- You create the layout of published editions or writers, dramatic, and musical works

You can copyright your work by using the copyright symbol, (©) your name, and the year of creation. Whether you mark your work or not does not affect the level of protection it gets.

How copyright protects your work:

It prevents people from:

- Copying your work

- Distributing copies of your work, whether for free of charge or for sale

- Renting or lending copies of your work

- Performing, showing or playing your work in public

- Making an adaption of your work

- Putting it on the internet

Cases of Copyright Infringement:

Blurred Lines: Marvin Gay was awarded, by a jury, £7.4 million for blurred lines

Oracle/Google case: In 2010, Oracle filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming that the company violated the copyrights and patents in the creation of the Android mobile operating system