“Plagiarism is a violation of intellectual honesty. Plagiarism is passing off another person’s work as one’s own. It is taking and presenting as one’s own the ideas, research, writings, creations, or inventions of another.”

The Honor Code pledge: “I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this assignment.”

The basic premise of the honor code: “Faculty agree that they will support an intellectual environment of trust and respect for students… Students, in exchange, agree to two things: 1) that you yourselves will not cheat, plagiarize, or duplicate work on separate assignments, and 2) that you will take action if you become aware of other students’ honor code violations.”

And now Lessig on Free Culture:

“For the Internet has unleashed an extraordinary possibility for many to participate in the process of building and cultivating a culture that reaches far beyond local boundaries… Digital technologies, tied to the Internet, could produce a vastly more competitive and vibrant marketfor building and cultivating culture; that market could include a much wider and more diverse range of creators; those creators could produce >and distribute a much more vibrant range of creativity…” (Lessig, 9)

“The battles over copyright and the Internet seem remote to most. To the few who follow them, they seem
mainly about a much simpler brace of questions—whether “piracy” will be permitted, and whether “property” will be protected. The “war” that has been waged against the technologies of the Internet—what Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) president Jack Valenti calls his “own terrorist war” has been framed as a battle about the rule of law and respect for property…” (Lessig, 10)

“But those simple beliefs mask a much more fundamental question and a much more dramatic change. My fear is that unless we come to see this change, the war to rid the world of Internet “pirates” will also rid our culture of values that have been integral to our tradition from the start.” (Lessig, 10)