Answer:
Plagiarism involves the copying of someone else’s creation or ideas and passing them off as one’s own without attribution to the original author. Plagiarism is generally a matter of ethics and is dealt with primarily through social norms, ethics policies, academic standards, and codes of conduct. Plagiarism will usually give rise to professional or academic sanctions, and will not necessarily be the subject of legal proceedings.
Copyright infringement is a matter of law and will give rise to legal sanctions. An action may be considered plagiarism but not copyright infringement and vice versa, or both at the same time.
For example, copying part of a text and not crediting the author could be considered plagiarism in an academic context, but not copyright infringement if the reproduction is allowed under an exception or if the text is in the public domain (subject to the application of moral rights). Conversely, copying part of a text without authorization and without benefiting from an exception but with correctly crediting the author could be copyright infringement but not plagiarism.
Creative Commons licenses are not designed to address issues that fall outside the scope of copyright law, although, when the licenses were first developed, Creative Commons expected that the attribution requirement would contribute to reducing instances of plagiarism. Regardless, activities such as plagiarism are not directly governed by the application of CC licenses.
That said, the attribution requirement and the obligation to indicate modifications made to a work can alleviate authors’ concerns over plagiarism and serve to assist in the enforcement of attribution and citation in the scholarly and academic contexts.
For more information, read the blog post from Creative Commons: Why Sharing Academic Publications Under “No Derivatives” Licenses is Misguided.