With plagiarism appearing all over the news in the last year or so (including the more recent incident with Fareed Zakaria), one can't help but wonder why it's only getting this much press now. The Internet is so powerful and so complex it's easy to get away with just about any type of plagiarism, copyright infringement, and just outright copying. It's not even about torrents, P2P file-sharing, and Usenet. Anyone with even rudimentary HTML or XML skills can extract content from web pages and even remote servers if they tried. That alone isn't so bad until you start using it and claiming it as your own work.
With news about politicians faking their dissertations, scientists copying other people's research, and journalists taking text from other journalists (that's you Zakaria), it's hard to condemn high school students and college joes who copy and paste text for their reports. Have teachers and educational institutions evolved to put safe defense mechanisms to prevent this? I'm not so sure. Back in the days of libraries and the Dewey Decimal System, you had to cite everything and learn the proper rules for doing so. The classic Chicago Manual of Style and the Harvard citation guide has made adjustments to compensate for new media like YouTube videos, blogs, and even advertisements, but that doesn't mean the writer of the document won't claim ideas as their own. Online crowdsourcing has already brought low several European politicians and their "accomplishments" plus quite a few scientists with questionable results. Hopefully, that trend continues, albeit in a less vengeful or malicious manner.
Wonder how many are copying and pasting at this very moment?
Free iOS and Android apps, FOSS, reference sites, well-written blogs and reviews, Linux . . . the Internet is still filled with genuine, free, and very real products, ideas, and services. Digital plagiarism to promote yourself and/or get ahead is not only lazy but embarrassing. Wouldn't you want to stand out and prove what you can do rather than copy someone else's work?
I sometimes wonder if some kid in junior school swipes opinions, tutorials, and essays from the Unsolicited But Offered blog. If someone did, it would sure be flattering. But I wonder if they would do that if they knew the writer was a short Asian dude who taught himself tech by mopping floors, "borrowing" hardware from the school servers and workstations, and scraping for money to buy one device a year? That would sure make a good news story.
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