Assessing the Knowledge and Perceptions of University of Zambia LIS Students Towards Copyright

Abstract

The academic world has been faced with issues of cheating, lack of knowledge regarding copyright in general and plagiarism in particular. Literature, both recent and past for instance, according to Korletey (2014) in his research established the creation and ownership of knowledge-based products remain an important aspect of the socio- economic development of an individual and as well as the nation at large, this has led to the establishment that copyright laws are very important for better creativity on the part of the authors and protection of intellectual content of their work. However, it is not certain if information users actually have a reasonable level of knowledge of these copyright laws as a means of protecting the intellectual creativity of respective authors. They might have reasonable level of knowledge of these but still infringe on the laws. Student’s plagiarism occurs in different forms, including incorrect citation and totally stealing someone else’s ideas and work. Apart from this, there is also continued use of copied music, software, the so called “free downloads” on the internet. However, it is not known the extent to which copyright issues are understood at UNZA by students in particular. The concern of this study therefore is to assess the knowledge and the different perceptions among undergraduate students at the University of Zambia on the issue of copyright.