http://www.plagiarism.org and http://www.Turnitin.com
Latin kidnapped the word "plagion" from ancient Greek
and it ended up in English as "plagiarism". It literally
means "to kidnap" - most commonly, to misappropriate
content and wrongly attribute it to oneself. It is a close kin
of piracy. But while the software or content pirate does
not bother to hide or alter the identity of the content's
creator or the software's author - the plagiarist does.
Plagiarism is, therefore, more pernicious than piracy.
Enter Turnit.com. An off-shoot of www.iparadigms.com,
it was established by a group of concerned (and
commercially minded) scientists from UC Berkeley.
Whereas digital rights and asset management systems are
geared to prevent piracy - plagiarism.org and its
commercial arm, Turnit.com, are the cyber equivalent of a
law enforcement agency, acting after the fact to discover
the culprits and uncover their misdeeds. This, they claim,
is a first stage on the way to a plagiarism-free Internet-
based academic community of both teachers and students,
in which the educational potential of the Internet can be
fully realized.
The problem is especially severe in academia. Various
surveys have discovered that a staggering 80%(!) of US
students cheat and that at least 30% plagiarize written
material. The Internet only exacerbated this problem.
More than 200 cheat-sites have sprung up, with thousands
of papers available on-line and tens of thousands of
satisfied plagiarists the world over. Some of these hubs -
like cheater.com, cheatweb or cheathouse.com - make no
bones about their offerings. Many of them are located
outside the USA (in Germany, or Asia) and at least one
offers papers in a few languages, Hebrew included.
The problem, though, is not limited to the ivory towers. E-
zines plagiarize. The print media plagiarize. Individual
journalists plagiarize, many with abandon. Even
advertising agencies and financial institutions plagiarize.
The amount of material out there is so overwhelming that
the plagiarist develops a (fairly justified) sense of
immunity. The temptation is irresistible, the rewards big
and the pressures of modern life great.
Some of the plagiarists are straightforward copiers. Others
substitute words, add sentences, or combine two or more
sources. This raises the question: "when should content be
considered original and when - plagiarized?". Should the
test for plagiarism be more stringent than the one applied
by the Copyright Office? And what rights are implicitly
granted by the material's genuine authors or publishers
once they place the content on the Internet? Is the Web a
public domain and, if yes, to what extent? These questions
are not easily answered. Consider reports generated by
users from a database. Are these reports copyrighted - and
if so, by whom - by the database compiler or by the user
who defined the parameters, without which the reports in
question would have never been generated? What about
"fair use" of text and works of art? In the USA, the
backlash against digital content piracy and plagiarism has
reached preposterous legal, litigious and technological
nadirs.
Plagiarism.org has developed a statistics-based
technology (the "Document Source Analysis") which
creates a "digital fingerprint" of every document in its
database. Web crawlers are then unleashed to scour the
Internet and find documents with the same fingerprint and
a colour-coded report is generated. An instructor, teacher,
or professor can then use the report to prove plagiarism
and cheating.
Piracy is often considered to be a form of viral marketing
(even by software developers and publishers). The
author's, publisher's, or software house's data are
preserved intact in the cracked copy. Pirated copies of e-
books often contribute to increased sales of the print
versions. Crippled versions of software or pirated copies
of software without its manuals, updates and support -
often lead to the purchase of a licence. Not so with
plagiarism. The identities of the author, editor, publisher
and illustrator are deleted and replaced by the details of
the plagiarist. And while piracy is discussed freely and
fought vigorously - the discussion of plagiarism is still
taboo and actively suppressed by image-conscious and
endowment-weary academic institutions and media. It is
an uphill struggle but plagiarism.org has taken the first
resolute step.