«Professional plagiarism»

In our modern world, in the world of advanced technology and the World-Wide Web, where it is easy to find any information you want, not to mention books, movies, music, etc., it is hard to avoid the fate to become a victim of plagiarism. This article we would like to dedicate to the subject.

On the web page of a company “Потрам-Нефть” there appeared an advertisement of Mini-Plant “Потрам-Кислый гудрон – Легкая нефть” (“Portram-Acid tar – Light oil”). The advert contains no information about the mini-plant. Instead, it gives a full description of acid tar neutralization technology. It entirely repeats the information from the official CORVUS Company web page.

In CORVUS Company article “Сернокислые гудроновые озера и методы их утилизации” (“Acid tar lagoons and methods of their disposal”) besides of the tar lagoons condition analysis and methods of their remediation there is also introduced an acid tar processing technology (which has been patented in Latvia, Russia, Germany) and the results of pilot tests of acid tar transformation into fuel.

Just CORVUS Company developments were placed on the web page of “Потрам-Нефть” as their own original works (no references to CORVUS Company). Even typos in the text were carried over too. Such kind of foreign materials use, without reference to the author, is considered to be plagiarism and condemned in the whole world.

Plagiarism — the intentional appropriation of authorship of another person’s works of science or thoughts or art or inventions. Plagiarism may be a violation of copyright and patent law and being as such it may lead to legal liability.

The most commonly plagiarism is expressed in the publication. A person under his own name using another persons’ product or ideas, as well as borrowing fragments from the foreign works without specifying the source of borrowing. An obligatory feature of plagiarism is the appropriation of authorship, as the wrongful use, publication, copying of the work is protected by intellectual property law and by itself it is already not plagiarism but piracy. Piracy becomes plagiarism by the wrongful use of one’s intellectual work results and assigning of authorship by a publisher. Professional plagiarism provides the appropriation of intellectual, creative and professional achievements of the others for professional purposes (a goal — prestige, income, awards, recognition and so forth). Educational and scientific plagiarism — is the unauthorized use of someone else’s intellectual property solely in the process of obtaining scientific degree, educational qualification or recognition in the areas (http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/ruwiki/80002)».

Unfortunately as we see CORVUS Company intellectual property sparked a true interest of scientific and technical literature readers and devotees. Article parts that were written by the company’s employees and presented on the official web page of the company were accurately copied and pasted in “creative works of the devotees”. The fact that surprised most of all is that people having no basis (inventions, patents, licenses) for the activity they narrate about not only gave any reference on the source of the used information, and thus appropriated the copyrights, but also not even bothered to change the presented work design.

If for the company „Потрам-Нефть” the appropriation of another authors’ works is the common practice then we truly feel sorry for the real authors of inventions who are working in the company. Regarding our case we consider that „Потрам-Нефть” must straight take away the appropriated material from its web page and apologize to CORVUS Company.