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JIMINY SELF-HELP HANDBOOK 18

be used for educational purposes is not a work, unless it has an artistic element, e.g. unconventional
framing was used when taking the photograph.

Although the Internet provides multiple opportunities for collaboration and sharing information
online, its users should not be misled by the information provided by external websites. Also, in the
case when you receive contents through clouds – the fact that someone shares files with you does not
give you automatic permission to continue freely sharing them. File sharing, in fact, involves the
exchange of intellectual property. When you are sharing your own work, consider the rights you want
to grant to users, i.e. to view, download, edit, share or amend the content. When you are sharing any
content that is not of your primary ownership, revert to the original source for confirming the
ownership rights and further sharing possibilities.

Personal copyrights are unlimited in time, non-transferable, and are held without any registration or
fee. Copyright protection arises when the work is established, i.e. the author decides to share his work
with others. The author always has a connection with his or her work - therefore, we cannot tag a
work, e.g. a book, with someone else's name, or attribute it to ourselves, as it will constitute plagiarism.

The solution to be on the safe side is creating your own content with only some meaningful additions
in the form of YouTube videos, pictures from open sources or audio clips from the news, for instance.
As a trainer you have control over the process of training and should adjust the type of content to the
peculiarities, difficulties, disadvantages and type of your learner(s).

Copyright infringement
Copyright infringement occurs every time we use a work outside the scope of permitted use without
obtaining the required permission. Criminal liability may be the result of plagiarism or other personal
copyright infringement (lack of authorship information, public distortion of the work, preventing or
hindering control of the use of the work). In addition, it is an offence to distribute the work or fix the
work for distribution, or to fix the work for distribution, without authorization.

The easiness of copying information that communication technologies give us, may tempt to commit
plagiarism. The same technologies, however, make it easier to detect plagiarism. If the text has been
copied from the Internet, plagiarism can be detected by anyone using most Internet search engines.
Anti-plagiarism programs can compare texts with Internet resources and databases. However, if we
limit plagiarism detection only to mechanical text comparison, plagiarists will easily avoid responsibility
- popular text editors offer, for example, automatic word changing options. Therefore, with the current
state of the art, plagiarism detection still requires the active involvement of people. One should pay
attention not only to direct “borrowing” of text or fragments of visual or musical works, but also to
impersonating others' ideas and discoveries.
Moreover, according to EU law, making temporary copies on the user's screen or in the user's cache is
not, in itself, illegal (5 June 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), British Meltwater
case).

One more consideration is the difference between copyright and patent. If you can show that your
work has been developed from a different path and that you did not copy someone’s work, that’s a
defence to the allegation that you have infringed their copyright.