Over $9.5 billion is estimated to be the U.S. trade loss due to international copyright piracy (IIPA 2). This enormous amount represents the major victim of copyright violations in America alone but extends to the other nations in both a U.S. geopolitical cascade reaction and the actual infringement incurred for the respective country; essentially the worldwide economy suffers. Students fail to realize that copyright infringement is not a victim-less crime and that it is destructive to both the financial and information market. They carry such beliefs throughout their lives unless they are educated with proper information concerning intellectual property and reminded of the victims that would result from such infringement. The IPE program I suggest would definitively place faces on the victims of breaching copyright law.
Students are afraid to cite material in their compositions because they either do not know how to or they believe that they will receive less a grade if they cite another's work. With the electronic emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW), there has been greater and easier access to information and the opportunity to copy material has largely increased by the simple "copy-paste" method. The IPE component would contain subsections to include proper citation and the negative effects of plagiarism, thereby promoting the use of reference, valuing and respecting other's and their own ideas, and hindering plagiarism from entering their papers. The students would be able to apply the same theories to other intellectual property and make correlation with harmful effects of abusing and infringing those properties.
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