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Advice on Academic Best Practices Dr. George Corliss, MU EECE |
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Intellectual Property
Sometimes questions are raised about students not appropriately giving credit to their sources, or worse. You are split between the world of school and the (current or future) world of work. You are entirely justified to ask whether the rules of school have any applicability to work. I believe the training we attempt in giving credit where credit is due is more important that the training we offer in technologies. You can learn technologies on your own, but you won't learn to credit your sources anywhere else, except possibly in a courtroom some day. Attribution of sources is not just a professors' fetish. On the job, few bosses care explicitly about where you get help to get your work done. If you can find a program somewhere that does what you were assigned to do, that is called productivity, and you are rewarded. Usually, your rewards are no less if you say explicitly in the code and whatever other reporting there is, "I got that from ___. Their code is _____, and I made these modifications, extensions, simplifications." That is called good documentation and makes maintenance easier. In school, crediting sources is one of the rules of the game set by professors. At work, crediting sources has more concrete benefits: 1. If you and co-workers know were you found something useful, you or they may find more useful stuff there some other time. 2. Material you get from sources more expert than yourself may be better quality, more robust, more reusable, better documented, etc. that what you might do under pressure. It may also be more authoritative. 3. Your company is interested in protecting YOUR intellectual property (IP). Over your career, you will create much IP value. It is critical to the company that your IP be protected by patent, copyright, trade secret, or other mechanisms. Hence, it is important to your employer that mechanisms for protecting IP work. Hence, they had better respect the IP rights of others. 4. Law suits are expensive. If you happen to really steal someone else's IP and get caught, it may cost your employer (you, too, but they may not care about that) a LOT. Your boss's boss SHOULD want to be careful that you use other people's IP only in appropriate ways to help avoid unpleasant conversations with lawyers. We do not hear much about Intellectual Property suits. A few make the news, but most are quiet. I have been an expert witness in several case, and they are not pretty. In one case, one independent contract programmer may have lost a half million dollar house, mostly to pay legal fees. The issue was exactly, "Who owns some of the code this programmer delivered to a clients?" If she had put a few lines of citations in several code modules, there would be no case. Since most suits have two sides, in some sense, you are as likely to be the plaintiff as the defendant. If someone uses YOUR work, you expect them to give you appropriate credit and/or payment. Do unto others ... It is true that your professors nag more about crediting your sources than your boss will, but the consequences of not crediting your sources is far more severe on the job, and the benefits (you are the owner of much IP, too) are far greater. How should you format references? One excellent source is the MLA Manual of Style, see owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/research/r_mla.html Moral: Get in the habit of being overly generous in giving credit to anyone who has influenced your work. That includes sharing any recognition generously with teammates, too. For more thoughts on scholarship, see
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Best Practices: | Marquette University. Be The Difference. | Marquette | Corliss | Best practices |