Plagiarism in publishing

Computers and the internet have made many tasks easier- including the ability to commit theft and cheat. No, this is not a reference to sophisticated phishing scams, e-banking heists or the various forms of online fraud and data theft, often discussed in the E-Security debate. The ease of access to unprecedented levels of digitized and digital material has given way to an epidemic of ‘copy-and-paste’ content-producing in favor of actual writing. As the good folks at Tunitin (an online plagiarism prevention system) – put it, “the seemingly ‘public’ nature of online content blurs the distinction between publicly and privately owned information. Electronic resources, by nature easily reproducible, are not perceived as ‘intellectual property’, in the same way that their material counterparts are. Just as peer-to-peer file sharing programs have made it easy to trade copyrighted music files, which most people would never think to steal in physical form, the internet makes plagiarism easy for students and writers who might have thought twice about copying from book or a published article.”

Plagiarism, that is, deliberately using someone else’s language, ideas, or other original material without acknowledging the source, has been the bane of publishers, writers and researchers long before the existence of the World Wide Web. However, today, anyone with sufficient technical ability to operate a computer an surf online, can access and snip unlimited amounts of content and publish it, making readers believe that certain written material is original, when it is not.

Content theft is a serious concern for many bloggers and line publications. Recently, it seems their paper-based print counterparts too, are not spared from the scourge of intellectual property theft.