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plagiarism
The web's not only the world's biggest
photocopier, it's also a device for appropriating someone else's
property of the mind.
Plagiarism - claiming another's text or
other creativity as your own - has a long and distinguished history in
the centuries before telecommunications. The ease with which content can
be accessed and manipulated using digital technologies means that
plagiarism's of increasing concern for authors and site developers. It's
also a business opportunity for entrepreneurs in North America and parts
of Asia, offering to sell your kids an essay for their next high school
assignment.
Studies
The ease with which online images and
text can be appropriated is for many an inducement to plagiarism (and
one reason why the 'attribution' provisions of the new Moral Rights
amendments to the Australian Copyright Act are of particular
significance).
For perspectives on plagiarism, offline and online, we
recommend Marcel LaFollette's comprehensive Stealing Into Print:
Fraud, Plagiarism & Misconduct in Scientific Publishing
(Berkeley, Uni of California Press 92).
It's more substantial than Perspectives
on Plagiarism & Intellectual Property In A Postmodern World
(Albany, State Uni of New York Press 99), a collection of essays edited
by Lise Buranen & Alice Roy.
God's Plagiarist: Being An Account
of the Fabulous Industry & Irregular Commerce of the Abbe Migne
(Chicago, Uni of Chicago Press 94) by R Howard Bloch and Forgers
& Critics: Creativity & Duplicity In Western Scholarship
(Princeton, Princeton Uni Press 90) by Anthony Grafton consider
pre-digital notions of authenticity - and how to turn a quick buck.
Thomas Mallon's Stolen Words: Forays Into The Origins & Ravages
of Plagiarism (New York, Ticknor & Fields 89) and Neal Bowers' Words
For The Taking: The Hunt For A Plagiarist (New York, Norton 97) are
accounts of literary theft.
Mark Rose's insightful Authors &
Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 93)
provides an historical introduction for the West. William Alford's To
Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese
Civilisation (Stanford, Stanford Uni Press 95) is essential reading
for appropriation and thinking about creativity and the marketplace in
Eastern Asia.
The Construction of Authorship: Textual
Appropriation in Law and Literature (Durham, Duke Uni Press 94) is
an excellent collection of essays on copyright theory, artistic
appropriation and piracy, edited by Martha Woodmansee & Peter Jaszi.
Judith Anderson's Plagiarism,
Copyright Violation & Other Thefts of Intellectual Property : An
Annotated Bibliography With a Lengthy Introduction (Jefferson,
McFarland 98) is a detailed bibliographical study of misbehaviour in the
US from 1900 to the early 1990s.
online
In the US debate about online
plagiarism is a central feature of the ongoing cultural wars, with
jeremiads about cheating by schoolkids and exposes that luminaries such
as Martin Luther King or John F Kennedy 'lifted' major parts of their
publications.
Student Cheating & Plagiarism
to the Internet Era : A Wake-Up Call for Educators & Parents (New
York, Libraries Unlimited 00) by Ann Lathrop & Kathleen Foss is the
latest example to hit the shelves.
US satirist Tom Lehrer, in disclosing a
secret of academic advancement, argued that it was as old as the hills:
-
In one word he told me secret of
success
Plagiarize!
Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So don't shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please 'research'
Ronald Standler's useful paper
on Plagiarism in Colleges in the USA examines the scale of the
problem, discusses specific examples and considers legal remedies. Bruce
Leland's Plagiarism & The Web page
is a succinct introduction.
Among pointers to online sources of
information about plagiarism we commend the University of Hartford
Plagiarism Web Sources page
and the recently updated Le Moyne College seminar
on Electronic Plagiarism.
Heyward Ehrlich's Plagiarism &
Anti-plagiarism page
at Rutgers University offers a brief introduction, along with
suggestions for using web search engines for detecting the theft.
There's a more detailed examination of those tools in Julie Ryan's paper
on Student Plagiarism in An Online World. We've noted
commercial plagiarism identification services below.
Among the "information just wants
to be free" set plagiarism's derided as yet another gutenberg
(non-digital, dead) concept. We don't plagiarise, we practice postmodern
situationist textual appropriation, ole! Information, it appears,
doesn't just want to be free - it wants to have as many authors as
possible. A starting point for exploring the situationist rhetoric is
the paper
on Utopian Plagiarism: Hypertextuality & Electronic Cultural
Production.
The US SCOOP
- Stop Cases of Online Plagiarism - network is a collective of visual
artists and authors concerned about the P word. Plagiarism.org is
a California-based service that matches submitted texts against a
database of term papers and material on web sites (claimed to cover 800
million pages). Plagiarized.com
is another US site offering resources for teachers.
commercial services
In response to the growth of free or
commercial essay sites (pay the $8 and get a paper on the subject
of your choice) such as SchoolSucks,
Whereitsat.com.au and The Evil House of Cheat
[sic] a number of entrepreneurs offer plagiarism detection services for high
school/college teachers.
These include:
EVE2
- a US product aimed at teachers; users download the software onto
their machine/network and use it to compare student texts submitted
electronically.
Copycatch
- UK "forensic automated collusion
and plagiarism" software that compares networked essays within
educational institutions
plagiarism.com
(Glatt Plagiarism Services) - is a
commercial body, independent of plagiarism.com, that offers detection
software and training programs
WordCheck
KeyWORD - a keyword-matching
service, comparing a local database of texts with documents that are
online or submitted electronically
Digital Integrity's Findsame
- a service aimed at business and the education sector, marketed
as searching for fragments of text rather than keywords.
IntegriGuard
- "the premiere [sic] Internet-based plagiarism
detection/prevention company (including paperbin.com
and howoriginal.com),
aimed at the education sector
Andy Dehnart's 1999 Salon article
on The Web's Plagiarism Police highlights some of the major
problems with those services.
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