Intellectual property has been somewhat of a hot-button topic on this campus, be it due to the copyright lawsuits filed against students by recording and motion picture companies or discussions over who owns patents that come out of research conducted at RPI. Intellectual property, however, is not something that only companies and researchers should care about.
Union clubs are an example of parties that often have their own IP. As newspaper editors, all of us obviously have given some thought to the IP owned by The Poly. In fact, the Editorial Board recently adopted an encompassing submission and copyright policy due to what many saw as misuse of Poly material without appropriate credit. We would hope that other clubs will of course respect our property, but also give some thought to appropriate use of theirs.
Aside from just clubs, though, each of us is constantly creating more of our own IP through our academic work. The homework and papers we submit are our own intellectual property, and that is part of what makes academic dishonesty so reprehensible when someone else tries to pass off others’ work as their own. According to at least one syllabus, though, “It is unacceptable to submit work written for another class. Handing in previously submitted assignments is considered academic dishonesty and may result in failure of this course.”
It is easy to dismiss this type of statement if it is not given much thought. If this policy were to be expanded to several classes, though, the consequences could be vast. While we are certainly not suggesting that people should try to write one paper and use it for everything, we can see little reason why people cannot reuse some of their own writing if it is relevant. One could even build on a previous work and give it additional depth. As each of us has our own distinct writing style, people could spend considerable time ensuring that papers they are writing do not sound too similar to any of their previous work. Being, however, that they own the original intellectual property, this notion seems absurd.
Two arguments supporting this policy are that one paper should not be able to be used for several assignments, and that you will not learn from the later assignments as intended. Both arguments have pitfalls. If the paper is on a topic they have written before, students could check with the professor and see if it could be reused. If it isn’t on topic, and they just submit the paper, they should receive poor grades for off-topic papers. One pitfall of the second argument is that a student will not learn much from redoing previous work and trying to rewrite it. Rather, one would probably learn much more from doing a different assignment or adding new information to previous work. In essence, while it is imperative that we respect others’ IP, it is also incredibly important that we safeguard our own.
