NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is an annual program where participants work to write a 50,000-word manuscript during the month of November.
In honor of this, let’s look at plagiarism law.
The Legal Information Institute says, “Plagiarism is the act of taking a person’s original work and presenting it as if it was one’s own. Plagiarism is not illegal in the United States in most situations. Instead it is considered a violation of honor or ethics codes and can result in disciplinary action from a person’s school or workplace.”
But if an author has a copyright or trademark, their intellectual property rights may have been violated, and they can sue a plagiarizer in federal court.
