Beware of theft ~ intellectual property.
Those who reference original sources need not worry. Those claiming another's intellectual property as their own is an entirely different scenerio.
A growing problem for legitimate media outlets; news, videos, blogs, etc., is theft of information and unfair competition. A new law which goes into effect September 2011 will help to limit such crimes.
When someone uses or "gathers" news from a source without claiming or acknowledging such source or referencing original source, it will be deemed a crime by theft of intellectual property.
Though plagiarism in some contexts is considered theft or stealing, from the point of view of the law, it is a non-existing concept. "Plagiarism" is not mentioned in any current statute, either criminal or civil.
Some cases may be treated as unfair competition or a violation of the doctrine of moral rights. The increased availability of intellectual property due to a rise in technology has furthered the debate as to whether copyright offences are criminal. (citation needed).
In short, people are asked to use the guideline, "... if you did not write it yourself, you must give credit" (notice referenced material not leading back to original source).
Plagiarism is not the same as copyright infringement. While both terms may apply to a particular act, they are different concepts. Copyright infringement is a violation of the rights of a copyright holder, when material restricted by copyright is used without consent or is used and not sourced back to the original holder or is sourced back to persons other than holder, this is infringement and a violation of one's intellectual property.
On the other hand, the moral concept of plagiarism is concerned with the unearned increment to the plagiarizing author's reputation that is achieved through false claims of authorship.
Plagiarism on the Internet Content scraping is a phenomenon of copying and pasting material from Internet websites, affecting both established sites and blogs.
Free online tools are becoming available to help identify plagiarism, and there is a range of approaches that attempt to limit online copying, such as disabling right clicking and placing warning banners regarding copyrights on web pages.
Instances of plagiarism that involve copyright violation may be addressed by the rightful content owners sending a DMCA removal notice to the offending site-owner, or to the domain that is hosting the offending site.
Plagiarism is not only the mere copying of text, but also the presentation of another's ideas as one's own, regardless of the specific words or constructs used to express that idea. In contrast, many so-called plagiarism detection services can only detect blatant word-for-word copies of text
Fair use, a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work, is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. Examples of fair use include commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test. The term fair use originated in the United States. A similar principle, fair dealing, exists in some other common law jurisdictions. Civil law jurisdictions have other limitations and exceptions to copyright.
http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-infringement.html
