As some of you may be aware, we at Minti are kind of strict on the copyright issue to avoid any potential copyright or Intellectual Property law suit. I am sure as Minti lovers that you would not like us to have any problems with the law, so here are some great tips to avoid your advice being flagged, me emailing you about copyright issues, or your article being reported and voted out for copyright breaches.

Some tips that will help you in getting advice that won’t go into the Reported Advice section or for me to flag the article are:

* Ensure that you have written the entire thing. If your friend or colleague or any one else apart from you has written the article, don’t copy it unless you have their permission as it is their work.

If you have copied it from another source, whether it is the newspaper, magazine or the internet, then:

* Ask the source of where you obtained your information whether you can use their work. Don't publish your article until you have permission.

* Your article must be in your own words. Only 10% of the article can be “borrowed” and you must reference it (just like at school!) To reference it, you have to provide a link to the original article.

If you copied it from a website, then the website will usually have some kind of copyright rule. The rules may vary from each website. For example, one website may be happy for you to have 200 words or less from their web page, but some websites such as Choice Magazine are rather strict and will not allow you to copy any thing from their website, even if you provide a link to it to reference it. In either case, you should obtain permission from the original authors of the work.

Another form of copyright infringement that you may not be aware about is paraphrasing - that is, putting existing works into your own words. If you are going to paraphrase, please provide somewhere within your article that the idea of the advice article was taken from that particular website, newspaper or magazine.

Further information can be found at the Minti Editorial Guidelines.