COPYRIGHTS & PLAGIARISM

Copyright is an intellectual property right. The person who owns the copyright (author, creator or the publisher) has the exclusive right to stop others from copying or reproducing his work. All books, magazines, plays, musical scores, sculptures, paintings, drawings, sound recordings, films, television and radio broadcasts, cable programs and computer programs are capable of enjoying copyright protection in Singapore.

If you photocopy, reproduce or make an adaptation of a copy of the owner's work without the owner's permission, you have infringed his copyright unless you copy under the following circumstances:

You copy for the purpose of your own self-study or research: in this case, you may copy up to 100% of an article in a periodical publication, or up to 10% of a book if the book contains 10 or more pages, or up to one chapter if the book is divided into chapters. If you copy an electronic edition of a book, whether found in a website on the Internet or in a computer diskette, you may copy up to 10% of the total number of bytes in that electronic edition, or up to one chapter if the book is divided into chapters.
You copy by hand for the purpose of a course of education which you are undergoing: you may copy up to 100% of the work.
You make a recording of television or sound broadcasts or cable programs for your private and domestic use.
You copy a work after its copyright protection has expired: in the case of literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works, the duration of Singapore copyright protection is generally the lifetime of the author plus 50 years, after which the work is in the public domain.
You own a genuine (that is, not pirated) copy of a computer program or an adaptation of a computer program and you make a reproduction of it as a back-up of the original.
You read or recite an extract of reasonable length from a published literary or dramatic work, or an adaptation of such a work, in public or include it in a sound broadcast or television broadcast or cable programme and give sufficient acknowledgement of the work.
You perform a literary, dramatic or musical work of a religious nature, or an adaptation of such a work, in the course of a worship service or other religious assembly.

With the exception of 2003, the members of the Management Committee shall be elected annually by the members of the club latest by the fifth week of the first semester.

A club may have the following standing committees:

Organising Committee
Publications Committee
Elections Committee

If you infringe or intend to infringe copyright, the owner of the copyright can apply for a court injunction against you to prevent you from committing any or any further infringing act and sue you for damages to compensate him for his loss.

The copyright owner can also seek an order to make you pay over the profits that you have made from the infringing act.

If you sell or hire out an infringing article you can be fined up to $10,000 for each infringing article or $100,000, whichever is the lower, or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 5 years, or to both a fine and imprisonment.

If you possess 5 or more infringing copies of any work, you are presumed to possess such copies for the purpose of sale.

The court may also order you to hand over to the copyright owner all infringing copies of his work for disposal. The court also has power to authorise the police to conduct searches on premises in which the court suspects infringing copies are kept.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism occurs when you take sentences or paragraphs or even the whole article written by another person and pass it off as your own work without acknowledging the author or the original source. This is actually cheating and will not be condoned by the Polytechnic.