Steal this story? Beware Net's plagiarism cops
Increasing number of sites are on the lookout for stolen words, phrases
They scour the Web in search of stolen phrases, dig through documents looking for evidence of looting. They can’t issue citations, but they can certainly let you know if you’ve failed to include one.
Yes, the plagiarism police are on the job.
The practice of copying, imitating or blatantly stealing the original work and/or ideas of others is, to borrow a phrase, as popular as sliced bread, according to statistics compiled by Plagiarism.org. In fact, in a study of 4,500 high school students and 1,800 college students, more than half admitted to copying work from the Web without proper attribution.
Plagiarism has reared its ugly (and sometimes false) head in publishing as well, with accusations lobbed at everyone from the Bard of Avon to the queen of daytime TV.
In the last few months alone, the p-word has been tossed — rightly or wrongly — at New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Twilight author Stephenie Meyer, a consortium of Bollywood movie producers and some sperm researchers from Newcastle University in England.
The practice has even cropped up on 140-character microblogging site Twitter, with some users crying foul over blatantly copied and unattributed tweets.
“The Web has made it almost ridiculously easy to plagiarize,” says Patricia Wallace, psychologist and senior director of information technology at Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth. “But it’s another one of these cat-and-mouse things. It’s made it very easy to do and now it’s easy to catch them.”
COPY-AND-PASTE NATION
One of the biggest players in online plagiarism programs is iParadigms, which offers three commercial services including Turnitin, a popular program used by around 8,000 educational institutes; WriteCheck, a “learning tool” designed for students to catch their own unintentional plagiarism and iThenticate, a program used primarily by corporations, law firms, research facilities, and scientific, medical and technical publishers (commercial publishers such as HarperCollins and Penguin have recently expressed interest, as well).
While a variety of packages are available, pricing for Turnitin generally ranges between $1 and $2 per student per year (there’s also a site license fee). WriteCheck charges $4.95 per 5,000 words and iThenticate offers customized pricing that depends on the type of customer, the intended use, and the expected volume.
Some people do intentionally co-opt intellectual property, but plagiarism mostly happens because people just don’t know any better, says Katie Povejsil, vice president of marketing at iParadigms.
“There are certainly people with malicious intent, but there are a tremendous number of cases that are in the middle area between complete ignorance and complete deliberateness,” she says.
“People do tend to go on the Web and grab something and use it and then forget that it’s not theirs. Or they just don’t understand the classic rules of the road about how you use and reuse material that’s available on the Web. They’re like, ‘Oh, it’s out there. I should be able to copy it.’ ”
'EYE-OPENING EXPERIENCE'
Janine Godwin, a certified professional organizer from Katy, Texas, says she started using the content-scanning program Copyscape in 2004 after she repeatedly found her work on other peoples’ sites.
“Talk about an eye-opening experience,” she says. “Other professional organizers had taken my writing and either put their name on it or put it on their Web site with my name on it but without permission. On one Web site, there were 860 words copied verbatim.”
Godwin currently runs her work through Copyscape’s free scanning program a couple of times a month but says she plans on subscribing to their premium service — which charges 5 cents a scan. According to Godwin, whenever she finds her work on other Web sites, she contacts the owners and asks them to remove it. If necessary, she brings in her lawyer to “scare the bejesus out of them.
“Nine times out of 10, they’ll be nice and take it down, but once in a while you’ll get somebody who’s a real butt,” she says. “They’ll either ignore it or be less than nice in their response. A lot of them say, ‘Oh, I just assumed it was okay to use because it’s online.’ ”
While accidental plagiarism happens both in and out of the academic realm, Ellen Lytle, a former graphic design and multimedia Web design professor at the Art Institute of Atlanta, says there are also those who beg, borrow or steal other people’s writing simply because they can.
“A lot of students figure nobody will find out, that the teachers aren’t smart enough to catch them,” she says. “It’s kind of pathetic that you have to doublecheck every kid, but that’s what I do.”
