Geetha: Unfortunately, I doubt that Attributor, or any system, will outright prevent plagiarism. There have been effective anti-plagiarism tools available to the academic and the literary arena for some time. Those tools do a phenomenal job detecting verbatim plagiarism but have not done much to prevent students or writers from engaging in it.

What Attributor can do is provide a steep deterrent and reduce the people who dare to try. In this modern climate, anyone who plagiarizes, especially regularly, should expect to get caught.

I too hope Attributor can effectively prevent plagiarism. By the way, I'm a lecturer in Physics. Of course the principles of Science remain the same everywhere and whoever writes them there cannot be much change. Only thing is that they can be presented in different ways. Depending on the author's talent, some approaches may be more striking and simple and more understandable to the students. But I have come across text books in which the contents are the "photostat copy" of another text book which deals with the same subject.The author never mentions anywhere in the book that the matter of this book has been adapted from the other book. This is an example of academic plagiarism.

Geetha: Let's hope that Attributor can do just that.

Sure Attributor is doing a great service. Plagiarism is not merely the act of copying and pasting of another's writing. It includes the theft of "ideas" also. This indeed can be very de-moralising to the original conceiver of the "ideas". It should be prevented in every way possible.

Ramanath: I think there's always going to be a human element in detecting plagiarism. Someone at some point has to actually read the work to see if it is a plagiarism or not. The best systems will work to minimize and simplify that work.

Reena: While I personally agree with what you said, I also have to say that it is up to the individual authors to decide how they want their content used. I feel that a more liberal system benefits both me and the world, but others feel differently and that is their right. I think an application like this should be there for everyone, including those such as myself more interested in plagiarism and others who want to enforce broader rights.

Pramath: Agreed, however, plagiarism of ideas is not enforceable under the law. An idea can not be copyrighted, only the expression of it. Ergo, a system used to detect plagiarism of ideas would only have a very limited use.

Alet: It definitely seems to be raising the bar a bit. I hope it goes well.

Chrisat: Hopefully Attributor can be a big part of the solution, absolutely agreed.

NTG: I have to say that I am unsure about the impact TII has had on academic plagiarism. I wonder if it has simply shifted the plagiarism from copy and paste to a more paraphrase plagiarism or, worse yet, to a custom paper mill kind of plagiarism.

In that regard though, the situation of bloggers is very different from that of professors and a service like Attributor might make a real difference. Here's hoping that the execution is as good as the idea!

Why should someone else gain popularity or make money form your content? I'm totally against plagiarism, be it web based or in any other form. Bloggers often face this
problem but have no way of proving it, therefore, Attributors move towards text, image or video monitoring is a great way of preventing plagiarism of online content.

The efforts to curb plagiarism have been successful on the university or academic level by using software's like "TURN IT IN", which essentially scans the database and the validity of the submitted paper against the already published data.

This is a very good idea presented in this blog and will be the next BIG THING if it works !

Plagarism has to be stopped finally.For the promotion of sites they do this but it really spoils the originality of the content.It would be great when this system takes its entry.

Great idea....Plagiarists are quite a pain...Though there are quite a few softwares around to monitor plagiarism..Attributor seems to moving it a notch up...Great idea, hope it sinks well...:P

Plagiarist dont just cut,copy and paste. Plagiarism by definition is taking someone else's ideas and the spreading them as one. And that is why banal,trite and hackneyed are considered derogatory terms by any intellectual. While most colloquial conversations are banal.
Anyways what I want to emphasize on is the fact that I don't see the software catching ideas. All it might be able to detect is copied text not plagiarism.

Yes, yes I do agree, protect content by all means. But isn’t the Internet all about a free and limitless dissemination of information? In a Utopian world, the creator of content would be fairly remunerated and people would be able to make use of it as long as it was in good faith.

While I am dead against copyright vesting in companies practically in perpetuity, I do comprehend the need to check flagrant plagiarism, so I suppose software like this is really required.

Further I have found this kind of software to be extremely accurate and efficient at detecting plagiarism, so it seems like the creators of the software have done a really good job!

Hi,

Plagiarism is indeed a bad habit that needs to be controlled. However, I am not sure software engines will be able to pin point instances of plagiarism. In fact some software provides you with wrong statistics about a copied page. Lets hope the effort will encourage people to rewrite content.

Rupal: I agree completely, when I heard what Attributor was doing, I got very excited about the product. Their goals are very lofty, but if they can achieve them there are a lot of people out there that will line up to use their service.

And I might be able to take that vacation...

Ramana: Once again, agreed. I'm excited about this service. But more importantly than that even, I"m excited to see a lot of companies entering this field and, if any of them can make a change in this area, it will be welcome.

Whatever any body can do to stop this scrouge must be welcome. It is now such a wide spread phenomenon of cut and paste for everything from content writing to resume writing that often, one feels disgust and stops proceeding further with the reading. This results in a lot of wasted effort and cost. If Attributor can pull it off, it will be a water shed in the field of intellectual property rights.

I think it's a good idea that Attributor comes with a system that can detect plagiarism on the net. Bloggers have often found content from their blogs copied into others site and have had nothing to prove it. In the past, Copyscape has halped in solving the problem and i believe there are others with the software too but none has proved to be very effective.
It'll be a sigh of relief for bloggers like me if someone can help us stop others from copying our text and images.