Plagiarism is the act of taking somebody else's ideas and passing them off as your own. Ideas are not limited to just text, ideas include all audio, video, images, text, animation, or any other element created by another individual. Copying one part of an original work is the same as copying the entire piece.
Copyright laws protects someone who creates an original work. Any original work, is automatically protected by copyrighted law. People are not even required to mark original works as copyrighted.
Any time you want to use a portion of a copyrighted work in your own multimedia presentation, you must ask the copyright owner or original author for permission.
Copyright laws vary depending on the date in which they were created. All work create after January 1, 1978 is copyrighted for 70 years after the creator death. Anything before this date various, based on certain conditions. Some use of copyrighted work may fall under the Fair Use law.
Once the copyright has expired, anyone can reprint the original work as they please.
Fair use is the right to reprint brief excerpts from copyrighted works, if the reprint falls under specific conditions.
