The correlation of «idea» and «plagiarism» concepts

Abstract

In the article the correlation of «idea» and «plagiarism» concepts is analyzed. Primarily we see the plagiarism phenomenon as a social and communicative one and consider its aggressive expansion into all spheres of society life as a logical consequence of social development. It is the society which makes certain norms of communication activities possible. At the same time we take into account that plagiarism has been studied primarily as a type of copyright violations, as well as an ethical violation and a manifestation of the destructive transformation of value priorities and the values themselves. Therefore, we strictly rely on the laws (Ukrainian and international) in the segment of copyright when interpret plagiarism in a social and communicative context; works of Ukrainian and foreign lawyers who have examined the plagiarism issues and the possibility / impossibility of recognizing the ideas as protected objects and, therefore, the recognition of the «plagiarism of ideas» as a particular type; and empirical material collected by researchers regarding specific examples of plagiarism and released through the mass media, because they are: 1) a platform, on which the circum-plagiarism discourse develops; 2) direct participants of this discourse as fighters against plagiarism and as plagiarists (black copy-and-paste and plagiarism of materials about plagiarism).

Therefore, having considered juridical, moral and ethical, as well as axiological aspects of the correlation of «idea” and “plagiarism” concepts, we can focus on the following statements: 1) the law both in Ukraine and abroad protects not an idea itself, but a form of its expression; 2) there is a contradiction in the understanding of the abovementioned concepts correlation in scientific and professional environments, in particular in mass media; 3) we can talk about the «plagiarism of ideas» not in the field of law, but in the context of academic honesty, moral and ethical principles of creative professional communities, in particular in the journalistic one, in terms of fostering of values aimed at the developing of a harmonious personality and eliminating of the information space deformations; 4) in our opinion, idea and plagiarism correlate as a creation and an annihilation of a creation – of the scientific, journalistic, and literary one.