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Abstract
As the illegal activities in the cyber space increases, higher education institutions put special efforts to strengthen the ethical education, emphasizing the importance of having ethics in the use of information. The purposes of this study are to measure the ethical levels of the college students and explore the current status about plagiarism on campus. The study attempts to suggest the effective ways to reduce academic illegal activities based on the study results. Total 108 college students of the K university located in the southern part of Korea participated in the study and a survey was conducted with them.
Key Words: Plagiarism, Ethical Issues, Information Use, Internet Ethics, Cybernetics
1.Introduction
1.1Background
Today's society is an information society. A great deal of information is created, edited, and disseminated every day. Information technology made such information related activities possible, bringing about tremendous development of the society. Through the Internet, it became easy to share and utilize the information, and help people accelerate to produce more creative works. On the other hand, the information technology-based environments keeps causing serious societal problems such as cybercrimes, internet addiction, illegal and ethical issues in using information [1,4]. The ethical problems in the Internet often occur because the information users believe that the cyber space is a personal zone and people do not see them in the space [3, 5]. In the cyberspace, there is a tendency that people's ethical awareness or consciousness become weaker than in the real world situation [7], Since the Internet users do not have any direct contact with each other, they feel the physical distance and think that they are the only users in the cyber space. It makes them to fail to control themselves or to be aware of other users' existence [5, 12], In this environment, illegal and unethical activities or harmful behaviors can easily occur. Many studies show that illegal activities and cybercrimes are getting diverse and serious every year. One of the most common unethical activities happening in the Internet is violating the copyright laws. In many cases, the Internet users often use other people's works without consciousness [6, 11]. Most commonly, intellectual properties such as papers, images, and music are being copied and these kinds of illegal activities become serious...