plagarism check

[rcareen]

hy i am new on here, i have drafted up a book which is not completely finished. I would like to create an ebook, before its published i would like to do a plagarism check on it.  Does anyone know if lulu provide this service and if not does anyone know of a service.  Thanx

[Peter May]

I have not heard of Lulu doing this -- but if you have written the book then you know if you've plagiarised someone -- I don't understand the need of a check.

[simonralli]

Peter

Thanks for asking that - I wondered about this and then began to question my own intelligence 

[kevinlomas]

?!

[rcareen]

Thank you for the reply, i have written the book but i was more concerned on the next book i want to write, cause its going to be a long book based on reality.  This is my first book and the only reason i was concerned is when we were writing our dessitation at university one of my tutors was saying that if we were to put something like 'money makes the world go round' (and we did not cite it) in the content that would be plagarism.  Cause someone has already invented that idea.

So this made me think that what if i did come up with an idea like that just by thinking about it and i had never heard about this person that created this so called idea, and that could go for anything.  So do you see my concern, I dont want to say something that someone else has sort of generated already.  And how can you go and read and research everywhere to see if what you say no one else has already generated/stated.  I am not sure if i am taking things to the extreme but this lady got me worried.

sorry this is long winded but i just want to explain myself

I have done research on copyright and now know that we need to ask permission from the author if we want to use a piece of their work without changing it.

And if we paraphrase in our own understanding then we just need to reference them

so if we paraphrase a paragraph for example do we then have to enter the paragraph that we paraphrased from in our book under our understanding and then if we do this put their paragraph in our book do we then have to ask their permission or can we just paraphrase and reference them?

I really want to pursue my writing ambition but theres alot i need to find out first and i dont want to do anything wrong in ignorance.

Appreciate your advice.

[rcareen]

This is in addition to what i was trying to explain

I would like to write a cooking book i have some recepies of my own the way i was shown by parent, what happens if someone else has a one dish with the same ingredients as mine, would that be plagarism cause like i was saying how can you go and look for every dish out there to see if one is the same as yours? 

I found today that if you want to use a link to a page you need written permission and alot of people did not even know that, and i probably would have thought there is nothing wrong in putting a link in your book, so this is example of what i am talking about. But as it is linking to someones elses content you need written permission, which makes sense i suppose. 

[Peter May]

So you wrote a "dessitation at university"? 

And they didn't explain plagiarism?

I don't think you have anything to worry about. You can't copyright ideas. You can't copyright ingredients for a dish.

If you write in your own words you'll be OK. If you copy a recipe word by word from someone else then be sure they didn;t copy it word by word from a book.

[kevinlomas]

It's not all that easy to copyright well know phrases or sayings either! Plagiarism is really to do with stealing whole or part books.
There's a saying by some famous chap >> "Copying one thing is plagiarism, copying three is research".
BTW you can copyright ideas if they have been written down, but they are often called Patents. :-)

[rcareen]

@ peter

They do talk about plagarism at university but not in depth as to the information you need when publishing, i did a course in computing.  Eg if a student wanted to quote something from a book they would not need to ask permission from the author, as the author has already given permission to the academic society for the students to use. When you are freelancing you need to get the permission.  Another example if we wanted to write a book on the best playstation on the market we would need permission to use their name eg sony playstation in our book and we would need to rely on using secondary information for facts about the product even if we do write it in our own understanding. Paraphrasing is not my concern i was more concerned if i stated an opinion as above and someone already copyrighted that idea.  Maybe the tutor did not explain it properly or maybe i misunderstood.  But as you said you cant copyright certain things so thats a relieve

@ kevin

yes i think you are right some things are copyrighted like famous quotations so thats called patents ok

The information you both provided has been helpful and reassuring my next set of questions will be on creating the ebook and packages ahh thank you for your help i will start a new thread

Ok

[kevinlomas · Accepted solution]

You can mention things like registered brand and product names if you state that they are registered and who to in a glossary somewhere. Usually they have (r) put with the names. You do not usually have to ask.

Books that allow you to copy sections from them usually say that you can as long as you say that you have. If they don't then don't.

Opinions are not copyrighted usually, because of what they are, but they may have a blanket copyright covered by a site or a book copyright page or even a TV show. People do expect reviews to be done by the reviewer anyway, not copied from somewhere else. They are often also covered by a clause to say that that is all they are > an opinion, but technical details should be exact, but some such details are often covered by another cause >> "to the best of our knowledge" & "no liability ... "

I was joking about patents, that's a different thing, but you can in fact lay a copyright on any image or readable print you think is original. I could copyright this posting. (c)

The thing to bare in mind is the views of the originator. People can and will sue for anything if they think they can prove it. It does not even have to be something considered to be against the law. Thankfully it costs so much only the very rich bother, and most bother even less if they think you are not making a fortune out of copying from them.

BTW. I hope you run a spellchecker over your manuscript.