Beware of copyrights!

Today a student created a new blog (2 days after the assignment deadline). The second post in that blog, by "orange2006", is a direct copy+paste of copyrighted material. The original content is most likely from Parenting and Child and the copyright information is found under the Copyright link on that web page. Another web page ParentLink contains the same information, with a note giving credit to the copyright holder, which is Parenting SA.

Academic work is by no way freed from the restrictions given by international copyright law. It is up to the owner of the copyright owner to grant other uses. A growing number of publishers, predominantly bloggers, use the Creative Commons licensing system to enable "the legal sharing and reuse of cultural, educational, and scientific works". True, it is within "fair use" to quoute some content, which then implies marking it as a quote - and - properly refer to the source.

I assume that "orange2006" did a mistake here and look forward to a clarification on the matter.

[update September 30]: Today I found that another student, julia24pl, had done the same thing in at least two postings in her Alone in the Network. Interestingly enough I happen to know Fredrik Wackå, one of the bloggers who has been ripped for his content. So I e-mailed him and asked for comments. To be continued in a fresh post...