Community Legal Advice

Plagiarism ‘the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.

Plagiarism is rampant in the internet age. Its all too easy to copy and paste someone else’s work and even to get money for the effort. If you are creating anything, artwork, info graphics, writing, there’s a chance that someone could find and copy your work for their own benefit.

There are several methods you can use in order to ward against efforts of plagiarism of your work. Using watermarks on your images is one. Watermarks are light, transparent images or words that are placed on top of the original imagery or artwork. When publishing your work online these will serve as an indicator of someone who might of copy and pasted your work.

Its important also to only upload your work to places or people you have some kind of deal or at least personal trust in. Certain websites may have regulations specifically against copying work, some might not have any. Check the details of where you are putting your work up for show.

The government requires that all people planning building work which; majorly changes the building (like an extension), is a new building, or changes the use of a building. In addition to the government having their standard check lists which they need to work through before the approve the project, they are legally required to let everyone who may be affected by the new build work (such as neighbours) the opportunity to voice their objections.

If you’re affected by build work in your neighbourhood, you are well within your rights to complain. You do this first by writing to the planning department, including all of the objections that you can think. The type of objections which receive consideration are, things like a loss of privacy, potential damage to your property, noise disturbance caused by the build work, even an adverse affect from the physical appearance of the building.

The internet can be a dangerous place and it’s important to know that you need to be carefully if you’re going to be sharing material that is created by somebody else. Images on Facebook and other social media networks are fine to share, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can use their image to promote your own or make money from it.

Photographers especially have to be very careful online and that’s why many of them will watermark their images, and make it clear that the copyright belongs to them. Written content can also cause problems and when you copy and paste content from somebody else’s website and try to pass it off as your own, you can find yourself in big trouble.

So the message here is always be cautious with the content you’re sharing or using online.

Twitter has forced the defamation act to go back to the drawing board, and the new version offers improved defence for website operators who host user-generator content. The new act states that operators will not be liable if they can show that they did not ‘post’ an offending statement, so Facebook users and Twitter users do get an element of protection.

Second publishers are also defended in a way, and this is because regurgitated content is fine in cases where it is not ‘reasonably practicable’ for the claimant to pursue the primary publisher. Courts also now have the power to remove any harmful material, but of course this can become uncontrollable in some cases where content has been shared too many times.

The new defamation act is not a complete overhaul but it has some important tweaks, and these may be welcomed by many Titter and Facebook users.

There have been a number of changes in the motoring industry but the most recent development is the change to ditch the paper tax disc. From October onwards, you’ll no longer have to place a tax disc on your windscreen.

Police can carry out checks whenever they need to, and over the last few years there has been less need to have the paper version in the car. You can now check online whether you’re a particular vehicle is taxed, so it’s time to take down the tax disc holder (in October).

The change in law means that tax is no longer transferred with the car in a sale. Car sellers will receive a refund for tax if there is one or more month’s worth on the vehicle while new owners must buy tax for the car before they can drive it.

This legal change is a big one, mainly because the tax disc has been around for such a long time, not necessarily because of the change sit will have on the public.