IMPORTANT LEGAL REMINDER: I may sound convincing at times (or not), but none of the content on this page should be interpreted as legal advice or take the place of consultation with a copyright attorney. I am not a copyright lawyer. I’m just a humble English teacher.

Traditional Information Sharing

Up until the end of the last century, the dominant medium for publishing and consuming information was print. Books, magazines, and newspapers populated the works cited pages of college essays. It was generally considered a good thing to see one’s name in print, because of how relatively hard it was to get one’s work published. Most people didn’t have access to the kinds of design talent and printing equipment necessary to put out even the humblest of magazines (though many tried by distributing what were often called “zines”), so in order for a work to be published it would have invariably gone through a sometimes rigorous and competitive process. Printing is a huge investment because it costs a lot of money in terms of materials and equipment. Not only that, you have to take the time (or strain yourself terribly) to go carefully through a text to ensure that it is free of errors before printing it out or else that edition will always be known as “the one with the error.”

Long story short, while there were countless books and periodicals produced every year across the world, it was far from possible for everyone to have their voices published. Depending on how you look at it, this limiting of voices could be understood as a good thing or a bad thing, and I make no evaluation here. Simply consider how, on the one hand, lacking access to a means of sharing your voice publicly could be seen as a kind of silencing while also, on the other hand, limiting access to only those voices that have gone through some kind of vetting could be seen as a kind of quality control. Trust me, I know there are all kinds of things we might protest in that last sentence (including its very structure), but let’s just move on because that’s the past.

Digital Information Sharing

By the 2000’s, many periodicals had shifted focus to the internet. As people became more and more likely to consume content from their computers and then their phones, it became increasingly clear that the old model of information sharing was a thing of the past. The internet didn’t just cause this shift in medium, either. As we all know, the internet offers anyone with access and a minimum of technical knowledge the ability to immediately and permanently share their words and ideas with the world.

Again, we can have endless discussions about how this could be understood as a good thing or a bad thing (and feel free to consider this as a topic for a research project). I’d like to focus specifically on how this change has potentially impacted the critical thinker engaged in the process of academic or professional research.

It’s true that digital information sharing makes more easily accessible the traditional content that those of us from the last century grew up depending upon. For example, instead of purchasing a copy of the local newspaper, people now are more likely to simply visit the news organization’s website. Similarly, reference books like Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary have their online equivalents and keep them more up-to-date than that old dusty print version from the 1980’s sitting on the shelf in the library. However–again, as we all know–digital information sharing via the internet has made all kinds of things possible that print never could. There is user-generated content on wikis (such as the very-popular and often-maligned Wikipedia) and personal blogs. Anyone can literally put whatever they want on a blog or a wiki, and only in the cases that it violates law or site rules is it likely to be taken down against the will of the author.

“All Rights Reserved” and “Fair Use”

Discussions of copyright may only be interesting to a small subgroup of individuals, but we should all take a moment and consider the impact of easy digital information-sharing on our perception of intellectual property use. As noted previously, copyright is automatic and implied. In other words, the content you consume (whether digitally or not) is protected by copyright and your legal and ethical usage of it is limited. For example, if you copied an article from a website and pasted it onto your own, you could be subject to lawsuit by the copyright owner even if you say where the words came from and who wrote them. This applies not just to words, but to other kinds of digital content, including music, images, and videos.

So what does this have to do with research? Well, information-sharing is what makes research possible, and in this new environment where literally anything might be immediately accessible on the internet, we are obliged to pay attention to how we use the intellectual property of others. When we incorporate information or words from existing sources into our own texts (whether into our essays, our songs, our videos, whatever), we do so at the risk of being accused of copyright violation. In many cases, including writing book reviews and conducting academic research, certain specific uses of material may be defensible as “fair use.” The concept of “fair use” basically says, “Yes, I violated your copyright, but only a little bit, I used the materially differently than you intended, and it will have no impact on your ability to profit from your own work.” As a student, the research that you include in your assignments is virtually always defensible under “fair use” because you are doing it for school and submitting it just to your instructor or your class.

Outside of school, however, we need to be very careful about sharing information that we’ve located online. Just because something is easily and freely accessible via a link or a Google search does not mean that the information is up for grabs to do with what you want. Far from it. It is in all of our best interests to understand the legal and ethical principles of content-sharing outside of the limited educational context.

“Some Rights Reserved”

So what about Wikipedia? At the time of this writing, Google straight up copies information from Wikipedia and includes it on the search results page. You don’t even have to go to the web encyclopedia itself to get some of that information! Doesn’t that mean it’s everyone’s?

Kind of. Because of the trickiness of copyright in the digital age, many advocates for information-sharing have supported what is known as “open source” content or “openly-licensed” content. This kind of content tells you explicitly what kind of permissions you have in reusing the material. While the vast majority of online content is available for access only (“all rights reserved”), there is an increasingly large amount of content that people are making available under open licenses, such as those developed by the nonprofit Creative Commons. Wikipedia, for example, offers all of its content under a Creative Commons “Attribution ShareAlike ” license, which means that you can use, redistribute, remix, even sell the content as long as you say where you got it from and include the same license along with it. That’s right: you can print out Wikipedia and sell it on a street corner and it’s totally legal unless you don’t say that it’s from Wikipedia and available under the license mentioned above.

Take a few minutes and read about the Creative Commons licenses. Scroll down to the section titled “The Licenses” and review the basic descriptions of the six different licenses.

Here is an overview in my own words:

• CC BY: Others can do pretty much whatever they want with your work, as long as they say who the work was originally “by.” This is the most “open” license.
• CC BY-SA: Others can do pretty much whatever they want with your work, as long as they attribute you and, if they change it, license any changed work in the exact same way.
• CC BY-ND: Others can use your work if they credit you, but they can’t change it in any way (“ND” = “no derivatives”).
• CC BY-NC: Others can use and change your work if they credit you, even license the changed work differently, but they can’t make money off of it (“NC” = “Non-commercial”).
• CC BY-NC-SA: Others can use and change your work if they credit you and aren’t making money off of it, but they have to license any changed work in the same way as the original.
• CC BY-NC-ND: Others can use your work if they credit you, but they can neither change the work nor profit from it.

Comparing Citation and Attribution

The terms “citation” and “attribution” may function synonymously in many contexts, but it is meaningful to examine the difference between them when we’re dealing with digital information sharing and open licensing as well as the academic context. A simple way to distinguish between the two terms, and identify which is appropriate to use, is to consider your purpose and your audience.

First of all, if you are using or remixing work that has been made available to you under a Creative Commons license, you need to include appropriate attribution in order to fulfill the terms of the license. This means that you need to make clear to your audience the title, author, source, and license of the work you’re using. This attribution is different from a citation not only because it doesn’t require a particular formatting style but also because it communicates to your audience the permissions granted by the author by way of the open license. In this sense, “attribution” is more or less a legal consideration, a way of communicating to your audience that something you’re using is used with general permission.

However, in most academic contexts, and in many professional situations, “citation” serves a somewhat different purpose. Rather than indicating the source and permissions associated with content, citation specifically functions as a way of documenting the origin of ideas and information so that one’s composition demonstrates appropriate grounding in an ongoing academic discussion. Regardless of content licensing, citation of ideas is necessary, whether these ideas are communicated by their authors under an open license or not. This helps to ensure the rigor and clarity of provenance we often expect from academic work and, as mentioned before, builds your composition’s ethos.

In brief, “citation” is the academic grounding for the ideas and information that you are addressing in a given composition, whereas “attribution” specifically refers to the way in which you are communicating the permissions that you are exercising to reuse or remix a work available under an open license. In academic research, whether source material you are quoting or paraphrasing is from an open journal or not, you have to include appropriate citation. Whether or not a component of attribution is necessary depends on the material you’re using and how you’re using it.