What is copyright?

All the work you submit should follow the laws of copyright. This means you are not allowed to use text, images, sounds, or other material that belongs to someone else.

You cannot use material found on the internet unless the owner gives permission for it to be used.

This country's copyright laws are very strict and organisations have to be very careful about what material they use. Fines for incorrect use can be very high.

The BBC has a whole department dedicated to making sure that all the material for the website has been checked. It is a complicated process and can take months to do. If you want to use images found on the internet, you will need to follow a similar process, so start checking early!

Plagiarism - using other people's work

Plagiarism is passing off somebody else’s work as your own. If the exam board catches you doing this, you would automatically fail the course, and it could put your other exams in jeopardy as well.

Authors don't mind students quoting them, as long as their name is mentioned in the text whenever you refer to their work. You also need to include the author in your bibliography.

If you don't include references [references: if you have directly quoted someone else, then you must include them in your references ] for original text, you'll be guilty of plagiarism [plagiarism: copy a piece of work and passing it off as your own ].

Whenever you use words straight from a text, you should put quotation marks around them, and give a reference to show where the text came from.

Image copyright

You can use copyright-free images like Clipart, and some material on the internet is also copyright-free. You must make sure that the images you use are suitable. Many Clipart and free images are a bit tacky and not suitable for some of the tasks you will have been set.

Try to avoid using common Clipart images

For a list of websites that offer free images, see the section on Web Research

Thousands of students are studying for DiDA, and they are all likely to have found the same good image on the internet. If the marker keeps seeing the same image, they will know it came from the internet and may check to see if you have checked that you can use it.

Project tip

Don’t rely on getting material from the internet - it is much better to find ways of generating your own resources. Try to get hold of a digital camera to take suitable photographs, use a scanner to capture your own drawings and plans, use a digital video camera to film an interview, record sounds using a microphone or get hold of a software package such as Fruity Loops to produce music.

If you create resources, the exam board will be much more impressed, you will learn a lot more, and will not be in danger of infringing anyone’s copyright.

Writing a bibliography

A bibliography is a list of all the sources that you used to make your eportfolio, this includes all books, magazines, newspapers, websites, interviews, and TV programmes. Writing a bibliography is an important part of collecting information in all the DiDA projects.

There is a standard way of laying them out that you MUST follow. This is:

1. Author – put the last name first.
2. Title – this should be underlined and in quotation marks.
3. Publisher - in a book this is usually located on one of the first few pages.
4. Date - the date/year the book/article was published.

Put each source on a single line, with a comma between each and a full stop at the end. You should arrange them in alphabetical order of the author’s surname.

You should also make sure that the list is double spaced.

Sometimes you may need to change the format around a bit, but always try to stick to the basic rules above. Use the examples below as a guideline:

Books Fleming, Ian, “Diamonds are Forever”, Penguin Books, 1957.

Newspapers and magazines Dancer, Dave, “How to Dance”, “Smash Hits”, September 2003, page 34.

An interview Jon Spencer, Architect, interviewed on 3/3/2005.

Website http://www.bbc.co.uk/dida, “Dangers of the Internet”, June 2005

An example of a completed DiDA bilbiography

Bibliography advice

It is best to keep your bibliography up to date as you go through each project. You'll find it is very hard to go back and try to write the bibliography once you have completed the project.

Follow these general tips to build an accurate bibliography:

• Keep a word processor file called bibliography open whenever you are working on your project. Add to it whenever you do some research.
• Remember to list authors and sources in alphabetical order.
• Remember it is fine to use secondary sources to gather information for your project, but you cannot just reproduce them. It would be plagiarism [plagiarism: copy a piece of work and passing it off as your own ] and could infringe copyrightcopyright: gives the creator of an original piece of work control over its publication, distribution and adaptation.
• You don’t need to have several pages of references, just put in the things you used. Don’t add things just for the sake of it.
• You will probably need between 10 and 20 references for most projects.
• Don’t put search engines down in your bibliography. It is the information that you found that is the important thing to include. This is also the case for images you find using search engines such as Google Images.