Leadership’s Future: Ignorance is No Excuse
by Miki Saxon
I used to have a really cool purple neon frame for my rear license plate; then I moved and was stopped by a cop because they aren’t legal where I now live. I choked when he said the fine was $150 and explained that I had just moved and didn’t know it was illegal. He reminded me that ‘I didn’t know’ didn’t matter, but let me off with a warning (the frame came off that night).
Ignorantia juris non excusat or Ignorantia legis neminem excusat (Latin for “ignorance of the law does not excuse” or “ignorance of the law excuses no one”) is a legal principle holding that a person who is unaware of a law may not escape liability for violating that law merely because he or she was unaware of its content.
I was reminded of this when I read that those growing up in the digital age may not realize that appropriating words and skipping attribution is stealing.
“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”
And that reminded me of my days in an office and the guy who ate whatever was in the fridge that appealed to him—even when it had a name on it. When confronted, he said he would have asked, but didn’t know whose it was or didn’t notice the name.
He obviously knew it belonged to someone, unless he believed in a refrigerator fairy, but he was hungry and that trumped all.
The words in cyberspace, especially the ones worth copying, like the food in the fridge, didn’t get there on their own and there sure as hell isn’t an Internet fairy.
Anyone who copies or downloads from the Internet knows the material didn’t magically appear—that is if they bother thinking about it at all.
And it isn’t just those in school, I came across a white paper on a business site and was flabbergasted to see whole sections lifted from this blog and twisted to fit the authors premise.
Needless to say, I was not amused.
Jen T. Verbumessor said, “Imitation is the highest form of pissing me off. Quit stealing my content and violating my copyright.”
We who write work hard; those who copy sans permission or attribution are thieves and ignorance doesn’t change that.
Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeblogs/3020966500/
