Frequently Asked Questions

Copyright is one of a group of intellectual property rights (or laws) that are intended to protect the interests of an author or copyright owner. In other words, these laws give an author/owner nearly exclusive control over the use of his/her work.

When an author signs the IEEE Copyright Form, he/she is transferring ownership of the copyright rights in the work to the IEEE. In other words, the IEEE becomes owner of the paper when the author signs, dates and submits a corresponding IEEE Copyright Form.

A trademark is a name, title or graphic design intended to identify an entity or product. When a trademark is registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, broadly exclusive rights are obtained by the owner.

Copyright rights protect the particular expression of an idea, not the idea itself.

Trademark and service mark refer to rights meant to protect a name, title or logo or other identifier of an entity or product.

Where copyright rights are nearly exclusive, trademark laws grant fully exclusive rights to the owner.

Infringement occurs when an author's work is reused without the author's approval/permission, even though full author attribution might have accompanied the reuse.
Plagiarism occurs when an author's work has been reused in such a way as to make it appear as someone else's work.

Plagiarism is a serious breach of professional conduct, with potentially severe ethical and legal consequences. Therefore, IEEE and its constituent bodies strongly condemn such misconduct and shall vigorously investigate all allegations of plagiarism involving IEEE authors and/or IEEE publications.

In the event an author or publisher brings a charge of plagiarism against an IEEE author or an IEEE publication, the Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of the sponsoring entity's publication should become the primary authority to initiate, conduct and finalize a review of the charge.

Fair Use refers to a set of ideas or concepts intended to limit (under specific circumstances) the near-exclusive rights of the copyright owner. However, because Fair Use is a doctrine and not a fixed body of laws, no generally applicable definition is available.