The Kidnapping of Content
By: Sam Vaknin
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.
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