With tools that can search billions of documents in seconds and can find matches only a few words in length, it might seem as if plagiarism would be as easily detected as finding information in Google. A matter of merely punching your query and going through the results.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the case.

Plagiarism detectors have a huge limitation and one that isn’t likely to go away any time soon. That limitation is, simply put, that plagiarism detectors can’t actually detect plagiarism and, instead, do something very different altogether.

How Plagiarism Detection Works

This problem might seem a bit odd to those unfamiliar with the technology. After all, dishwashers wash dishes and car starters start cars, but plagiarism detectors don’t actually detect plagiarism.

Instead, what they actually detect is sections of identical text. Though there is a variety of techniques for doing this, the end results are pretty much always the same. A plagiarism detection service looks for matching strings of words between the document its looking at and the ones it has in its index. This is true for a local plagiarism checker, such as WCopyFind, search engine-based systems such as Copyscape and Plagium and high-end system such as Turnitin.

They all work on the same principle and basically function much like we would expect Google or another search engine to work, finding the words we want in other sources and providing the best results it can.

While this makes them powerful tools, doing the same comparison by hand would be impossible given all of the sources these tools can check, it does mean that it has some tremendous blind spots.

However, those blind spots are only a problem if people aren’t aware or don’t believe that they are there. Then they become huge issues that can lead to both false positives and false negatives.

The Limitations of Plagiarism Detection

Since plagiarism detection tools can only detect copying, or more specifically similar phrases, there are two areas where they are particularly weak.

1. Non-Verbatim Plagiarism: Plagiarism that involves the rewriting, translating or otherwise redrafting the text can’t be detected. This can be difficult to get away with as most plagiarism detectors are extremely sensitive, but since plagiarism detectors don’t analyze the content of the work, just the words, it can’t see if you lifted the idea or information if you didn’t also lift the words. This is a common problem in academia, which treats this kind of plagiarism equally as seriously as verbatim plagiarism.
2. Common Phrasing/Attributed Use: Second, though many plagiarism checkers will make an attempt to separate out attributed use, given the variety of attribution styles it isn’t always possible. Also, given how common some phrases are in the English language, many plagiarism checkers will report matches that are actually just coincidence.

In short, plagiarism detection tools are just machines and they can make mistakes. However, that is true with any tool as, for example, you don’t discard Microsoft Word because you can make a typo.

Also, like any other tools, plagiarism checkers are useless without humans to use them intelligently, which is the biggest problem such tools have.

The Human Element

The answer to all of this is simple, the decision as to what is and what is not plagiarism should be left to human beings. Humans are the only ones who can detect non-verbatim plagiarism and are the only one who can make determinations about the likelihood that the matches are coincidence and the whether the attribution was adequate or not.

Professors who have a hard rule about papers not being more than X% matching or authors who don’t let others copy more than X number of words before seeking legal action aren’t fighting plagiarism, but are doing more to confuse the issue.

While bright line rules are always tempting because they are easy to remember and follow, with plagiarism, there are few such rules and you can’t turn your judgment over to a machine.

Bottom Line

None of this is meant as a slight to any of these tools. I use all of the tools listed regularly and am grateful for the valuable service they provide. The problem doesn’t lie with the technology, but with those who treat these tools as magical solutions that are capable of making perfect judgments about plagiarism.

They are anything but.

As tempting as it is to turn over our judgment on plagiarism matters to the machines, it simply doesn’t work. Not only will a lot of plagiarism go undetected, but a lot of people will be accused falsely.

Though plagiarism detection tools are a part of the solution, they have to be used in tandem with human judgment and discretion to do any good.

If used correctly, a plagiarism detection service will alert someone to the possibility of plagiarism, not to its actual existence.

Turnitin, which currently processes over 40 million papers per year, has a unique birds-eye view of the situation and its statistics, though somewhat limited in their application, are interesting and may be useful to at least some degree.

It is important to note, as Turnitin does, that they do not actually detect plagiarism and instead, only track copied content. It is up to a human to determine what is plagiarism and what is legitimately cited. Still, it’s clear from this report that many of the sources are plagiarisms as there is almost no reason or opportunity to use them legitimately in an academic environment.

Also, it’s worth noting that the study only looks at content copied from the Web and makes no mention of Turnitin’s other databases, including the ones it has of submitted papers and various academic journals that are not online.

So what did the study find? The results were interesting, but perhaps not very surprising

How the Study Was Performed

The study looked at some 33.5 million papers (including some 9 million secondary papers and nearly 24.5 million higher education paper) that were submitted between June 2010 and June 2011. In those papers, it found a total of 128 million content matches, just shy of an average of 4 matches per paper (Reminder: Matches are not necessarily plagiarisms, just verbatim copies, and they can be almost any length from very short to almost the whole paper.)

The study then traced those matches back to their sources. Those sources were then categorized into six categories, Social Networking/Content Sharing, Homework/Academic, Cheat Sites/Paper Mills, News Sites/Portals, Encyclopedias and “Others”.

The results were then tallied, along with information about which sites were the most popular, and were compiled into the infographic below.

What the Study Found

To be honest, there weren’t many surprises in the study. The top site, predictably, was Wikipedia, with 8% of all secondary and nearly 11% of all higher education matches coming from that one site. Yahoo! Answers was second in both lists, with nearly 8% of secondary matches and nearly 4% of all higher education matches.

In fact, of the top ten sites, 8 were found on both (Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, eNotes, Slideshare, Scribd, Oppapers and Amazon all being in the top ten on both lists). Secondary papers also turned to Essaymania and 123HelpMe, where high education students turned more toward CourseHero and Justanswers.

Since many schools have expressly banned the use of Wikipedia for academic research, at least as a source, it seems likely that many, if not most, of those copies are plagiarized. The same holds true for Yahoo! Answers as it is not a site one would normally use as a source in an academic paper.

One thing that was striking was that higher education students seemed to use a wider variety of sources, pulling more from news and portal sites, as well as from cheat sites and paper mills, than those in secondary schools. However, secondary students pulled three times as much from “other” sites, which included many review sites that were popular.

My Take

Personally, I didn’t find a great deal surprising about this study as it matched up well with what I’ve heard anecdotally talking with teachers and others in the industry. The biggest surprise was to see that higher education students are MORE dependent on Wikipedia than their secondary school peers, but they also showed a greater overall variety in the types of sources they copied from.

I likely would have guessed Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers on my own as 1 and 2, but I was also a bit surprised to see Amazon, Slideshare and Answers.com ranking as high as they did.

As for the data itself, to me it shows that students, by in large, are not being very creative about where they get their content from. The top 10 sites account for 31% of all matches on secondary students and over 35% of all matches for higher education students. All of the sites involved are heavily indexed and easily searched for in Google, meaning that, while Turnitin can help find matches and makes it easier to do so, at least when dealing with the Web matches teachers relying on Google are likely doing fairly well too.

(Reminder: The study did not look at matches on Turnitin’s internal database and archive, just the service’s archive of the Web.)

Still, the study does show that students are pulling content from a variety of sources, including many flagrantly illegitimate ones such as essay mills and cheating sites. As such, this study hammers home the importance of dealing with plagiarism proactively, something that the report strongly suggests.

Bottom Line

All in all, the study shows what types of sites that teachers should be expecting to find their students copied from, both legitimately and when plagiarizing. Of course, every classroom is going to be different, but this 10,000 ft view of content use can provide at least some information useful to those “in the trenches”.

Though I don’t think many educators will be surprised by these results, they are still interesting and still useful, making them something every educator should be aware of, especially as copying content from the Web becomes more and more common.

The Infographic

Click to enlarge

WriteCheck is a service that lets students submit a paper and have it checked for grammar and plagiarism. While there are many such services, this one is powered by iParadigms, the company that makes Turnitin, the most popular plagiarism checker for academic institutions.

This caused many to feel that iParadigms was, as one instructor put it, “warlords who are arming both sides in this plagiarism war.”

But while I can certainly understand this feeling of betrayal and this concern that students might use WriteCheck for the purpose of skirting plagiarism detection systems, perhaps using it to vet a purchased paper or to make sure their efforts to hide plagiarism were adequate, it is a misguided fear.

However, this is a fear that stems from faulty logic when it comes to fighting plagiarism and, sadly, the logic seems to be getting more pervasive as time goes on.

I’ve already talked at length about how schools are hurting the fight against plagiarism, but, as this WriteCheck controversy proves, schools have yet to really understand the issues involved and what they need to do to keep students from plagiarizing.

Stopping the War

As I mentioned in the previous article, there’s a pervasive climate of fear when it comes to matters of plagiarism. Students are threatened with severe punishments over an act that is often poorly explained and seemingly decided by a computer that they never see. Even honest students can be afraid of getting caught plagiarizing and that, in turn, does no good for the academic climate.

But as the “warlord” comment points out, many instructors feel that they are at war against plagiarists and that iParadigms and similar companies arms dealers of sorts. This turns catching a plagiarist into a victory and one escaping a defeat, an attitude that doesn’t bring about any progress or understanding.

The truth is that every plagiarist caught by Turnitin or a similar automated checker is a failure of the system and a miserable one at that.

Yes, that line of defense is necessary and it should be there, but it is the absolute last resort and, despite the impressive technology, the least effective as well.

Consider the many opportunities to stop a plagiarist BEFORE they are caught by an automated detection system:

1. Education: Educating students about what is and is not plagiarism, from a practical standpoint, is important for helping them avoid accidentally plagiarizing and understanding why it is important not to do so deliberately.
2. Assignment Building: A well-crafted assignment is virtually plagiarism proof. Building good assignments that are original, test the student’s knowledge and can’t be trivially copy/pasted is a huge step forward in the fight.
3. Academic Resources: Schools need to make academic resources available, such as assignment assistance programs, to their students where they can ask questions and get help as a means to dissuade plagiarism and eencourage a useful conversation on the topic.
4. Instructor Connection: Though not always practical, in many classes an instructor should know their student reasonably well and be able to detect when they are struggling, enabling them to reach out to them and provide greater help.
5. Instructor Intuition: Once again, if an instructor is familiar with a student’s writing, they should be able to detect plagiarism without having to run it through an automated system.

In short, with so many ways to stop or detect plagiarism BEFORE it reaches an automated checker, every case that gets that far has to be seen as a failure, a breakdown in the chain before that point.

Granted, some of these shortfalls have more to do with the education system at large, which often puts far too many students into a class, dividing up instructor attention too many ways.

However, others are more case specific, calling on the schools and instructors to think about plagiarism in a different way and shift their focus from “winning the war” to actually educating and dealing with the issue.

Moving Forward

The simple truth is, the developers of plagiarism detection system, iParadigms in particular, never intended themselves to be the plagiarism police. Obviously, that is going to be part of their function but such tools hold a great deal of potential to make students better researchers, something that WriteCheck can also do.

While there will always be hardcore cheaters who will “write” papers via copy/paste in hopes of getting a good grade or just get out of an assignment, they still are far outnumbered by the legitimate students caught up in the climate of fear.

However, it’s that climate of fear that may actually be encouraging plagiarism. Since many students feel they can’t control if they will or will not be accused of plagiarism, they feel they might as well be a plagiarist.

Warped logic, to be certain, but further proof of how relying so heavily on the last line of defense can actually make the plagiarism problem much worse.

The way forward is to end the war on plagiarism, open up a dialog about it and focus the punitive efforts solely on the hardcore cheaters.

This approach much better serves the bulk of the students and limits the “arms race” discussion that’s taking place now.

Bottom Line

Will this shift in attitude be easy? No. Teachers are angry. They feel a lot of their students are trying to cheat their way to better grades both by lying to them and stepping over honest students who worked hard.

This anger is understandable, but it’s rare that good policy comes from an emotional response.

If schools and instructors look at plagiarism as a practical problem, the issue becomes much more clear. Over-reliance on plagiarism checking technology isn’t solving the problem, but creating a climate of fear and producing smarter plagiarists.

In short, WriteCheck isn’t the enemy, but the hatred of it is a symptom of a much greater problem and one that has to be addressed now lest the situation go completely out of control.

So what are the usage scenarios a plagiarism checker will have to face? There are three overriding themes and any specific case will likely either be classified as one of the three or may have a combination of two or even all three scenarios in them.

These situations highlight why it is important to be aware of the different plagiarism and copy detection tools out there and not just relying on one or two. Just as using a screwdriver is wrong when trying to hammer in a nail, it is important to use the right tool when checking for plagiarism and, to do that, you need to understand the different jobs there are.

1. Verifying Originality

In this scenario, you are given a piece of content from an unknown origin, whether an essay, a new article, poem, etc. and you need to check and see if the work is original.

This is the situation faced by countless professors, teachers and other educators every day. It’s also the one faced by editors in newsrooms and for sites across the Web The goal is to either verify that the work is original or determine if it might be plagiarized.

What it Needs

Generally, for plagiarism checkers in this area, accuracy and breadth of database content is the most crucial thing. Such plagiarism checkers don’t have to find every result, just the one correct result. However, it must be able to return that to serve any purpose at all.

Speed, however, is slightly less important though simplicity is crucial as many of the people reading the reports as those reading them often know little about the original material or the suspected source content.

Leaders

Currently, iParadigms is the undisputed leader in this field with its two main products, Turnitin, for schools, and iThenticate for businesses.

SafeAssign, which is owned by Blackboard, is a common alternative.

2. Tracking Content Misuse

This is the more common situation we talk about on Plagiarism Today. A content creator has written a piece of material they know to be authentic and want to track how it is being used on the Web. This involves not merely returning one accurate result, but rather, all the results available.

What it Needs

Breadth and accuracy are still important, but are less so. The reason is because there’s a higher tolerance for false positives as it is easier to make human judgements when starting with a known authentic source and, generally, there is only an interest in looking on the Web, not databases of academic content.

What is more important is the ability of the checker to return a large number of accurate results and to do so quickly. It’s not enough for the plagiarism checker to spot misuse and stop, instead, it has to find and report every incident it can.

Leaders

For casual users, Copyscape and Plagium are likely the best tools. For businesses, services such as Attributor and iCopyright Discovery are more robust solutions.

3. In-Depth Plagiarism Analysis

The final situation is one where one already suspects the work of being a plagiarism and has reduced the field of candidates down to a a one or a few documents. The checker needs to either confirm those suspicions or get a more accurate picture on just how extensive the plagiarism is.

What it Needs

If you already know where the work was likely plagiarized from, you don’t need any kind of Internet searching capability. Instead, you can focus on comparing the two documents in depth and that requires a flexible plagiarism checker that can easily sift through the works involved for similarities and produce detailed results.

Leaders

WCopyFind is one of the best-known and most loved apps in this area though there are also a slew of document comparison tools that can also work.

Bottom Line

Most people reading this are going to wonder what this means for them. The answer is simple: If you ever find yourself in need of a plagiarism or copy detection tool, it’s important to stop before making a decision and ask the important question of ‘What do I need to do with it?”

What you need the tool for is going to determine how you’re doing to use it and, that in turn, will determine which tool is likely the best.

There are still other differences between the tools, some seem to work better for certain types of content or plagiarism than others, but when deciding which tool to use, the first thing to consider is the job it will be doing.

Once you know that, the rest of the decision gets much easier.

Behind it was Turnitin, the most popular academic plagiarism checker and behind them was Ephorus, a Netherlands-based plagiarism checking application.

All in all, the tests put some 48 different plagiarism checkers through 42 different tests, which included English, German and Japanese language tests involving whole plagiarism, edited text, translations and a few originals. Of those 48 systems, 26 were able to complete the tests and earn a final grade.

The final grade was determined by both how well the checker performed on the tests as well as how professional it was and how usable it was in an academic environment, specifically its workflow and how quickly it returned results. The checkers were then grouped into three classes “Partially Useful”, “Barely Useful” and “Useless”.

Since none of the plagiarism checkers were able to score above a 70% on Dr. Weber-Wulff’s tests, none of the services were given a “Useful” score and instead received the equivalent of a C+ on their grade.

However, the test may have also exposed several other problems with automated plagiarism checkers, issues that could directly impact content creators seeking to find a service to track their work.

Problems and Interesting Results

The biggest gap in all the plagiarism checkers was the inability to locate translated plagiarism. While this is widely expected as the technology to make such detections simply is not there, it’s a hole in coverage that has remained since Weber-Wulff performed her first round of tests in 2004.

A more unusual and less-expected gap was the lack of coverage in Google Books. In every checker, 100% plagiarism in Google books failed to return more than 25% plagiarism in the checkers. It appears that the Google API, upon which many of these services rely upon, does not cover Google Books and that makes searching for plagiarism from books very difficult.

Also, umlauts and other non-English characters continued to present challenges to many plagiarism checkers though it was much less the case this time than in previous tests, indicating a better effort to internationalize plagiarism checkers.

Finally, with the spike of new plagiarism checking services, according to Dr. Weber-Wulff, has risen a number of services that appear to be less-than-honest about their intentions, including Viper Plagiarism Checker, which Weber-Wulff suspects is using its plagiarism checking service to harvest essays for its related essay writing service.

Results

As mentioned above, PlagAware took top honors in the tests, followed by Turnitin and Ephorus. Rounding out the “Partially Useful” category was PlagScan and Urkund.

The “Barely Useful” category was made up of Plagiarism Finder, Docoloc, CopyScape, Blackboard/Safe Assign, Plagiarisma, Compalitio, StrikePlagiarism and The Plagiarism Checker (Better Known as Dustball).

The “Useless” category was (not linking to these as some are dubious) iPlagiarismCheck, Plagiarism Detector, Un.Cov.Er, Genuine Text, Catch it First, Plagium, Viper, Plagiarism Search, Grammarly, Percent Dupe, Plagiarism Checker and Article Checker.

Dr. Weber-Wulff made it clear that her results are geared toward a very specific usage scenario, namely use in a German university. She also felt that even the most useful checkers were not ideally suited for checking every single student paper submitted, but rather, were useful when a professor had a suspicion of plagiarism and wanted to use an automated system to help track it down.

Still, the results are interesting and they show that smaller companies can, in at least some situations, be better than larger ones for plagiarism detection. The two biggest players, Turnitin and Blackboard came in second and eighth respectively. It also shows that there is a lot of fluidity in the market as Copyscape, the winner of the last round of checks, was in the “Barely Useful” category and was seventh overall.

Primarily though, it shows what I’ve known all along and that is the bulk of plagiarism checkers are garbage. I’ve said as such about some of the “Useless” services including Un.Cov.Er, Viper and the “Barely Useful” service The Plagiarism Checker.

But as interesting as the results are, their application to readers of this site is actually fairly limited. and the reasons are pretty simple.

Limitations and Caveats

Dr. Weber-Wulff made it clear that her research was targeted at one case use, namely that of a German university. However, she did strive to make the results more applicable to other uses, namely by including other languages and various plagiarism types.

Still, readers of this site who are working to track their writing may not want to read too deeply into the results and use them more as a general guide.There are several reasons for this.

1. Usage Scenario: There are two types of plagiarism detection, the first is testing a work of unknown origin for authenticity and the second is finding copies of a known authentic work. This test looks at the first scenario where most readers of this site need the second and both require different skills. This may explain why Plagium performed so poorly in these tests, but reasonably well in mine.
2. Language: The primary testing language was still in German, even though the test included both English and Japanese checks, the results will still likely skew to those with strong German-language checking.
3. Usability Requirements: Many checking their work for plagiarism won’t have the same usability concerns that a professor running through 200 student papers will. So usability issues that sank some of the checkers may not affect you.

That being said, Dr. Weber-Wulff’s tests are definitely a good guide and a good starting point. That’s why I, over the next month or so, will be going through and looking at many of the plagiarism checkers that took top honors in her tests and see how they do in tracking content for the purposes of a content creator.

At the very least, the results are a solid indication as to how well the algorithms work in these checkers and how large their databases are, that alone is reason enough to give them a closer look.

Bottom Line

Quickly, I want to thank Dr. Weber-Wulff and her student assistant, Katrin Köhler, for performing these checks. The two of them spent over 9 months performing these checks and are still not 100% done. I also share their hopes that the German government, or another government, might take up the cause of funding these checks in the future so her ability to continue would not be tied to one university with the funding difficulties that come with that.

Though these tests aren’t perfect in that they are not all things to all people, they are important and useful as they provide an apples to apples comparison between the various checkers and that are tested.

And that, in turn, is how I treat the results, not as a gospel on which plagiarism checker to use, but an unbiased test that compares the various services side-by-side in one usage scenario.

When treated that way, the tests become very useful and an important tool in determining which plagiarism checkers to look at.

Photo Credit: c. 2011: Axel Völcker, DerWedding.de

By their very nature, schools are supposed to be a place of education. Students, whether they are young children or retirees, go to schools to learn and grow as human beings.

However, on matters of plagiarism, that seems to be less the case. Educators have been quick to consider plagiarism a cheating issue, which it certainly is, but either ignore or pay inadequate attention to the fact that it is also an education one.

Simply put, no one is born with the ability to understand the difference between paraphrasing and original work, how to properly cite sources and when citation is necessary. These are all things that have to be taught and learned and anything that must be learned must be learned through some trial and error.

Unfortunately though, schools have created zero tolerance policies on plagiarism. While these policies are well-intended, they actually do more to create a climate of fear among students and that, in turn, creates not a desire to play honest, but a desire to try and defeat the systems that check for plagiarism.

In short, educators have accidentally created a plagiarism war and, rather than educating their students in how to cite sources correctly have, in many cases, encouraged them to learn on their own how to better get away with plagiarism.

This is creating real consequences for both the education system and for content creators outside, problems that are, in many cases, avoidable.

The Biology of Plagiarism

In more ways than one, plagiarism is a bit like a virus (or more appropriately a bacteria) in that it is an unwanted item that damages a healthy system. Like a virus, it can grow and spread, often as students teach one another about plagiarism or help each other commit the acts, and infect other parts of the system.

However, most importantly, plagiarism evolves in response to the environment. In that regard, we can think of anti-plagiarism software as being similar to an antibiotic. Useful for detecting and stopping plagiarism initially but, through overuse, becomes less and less effective.

The problem is that plagiarists have not responded to anti-plagiarism checking software by playing it straight and doing their own work, they’ve responded by changing how they plagiarize and where they plagiarize from.

Though my evidence is merely anecdotal, it comes from talking with students and administrators alike at various schools. When I talk to administrators about plagiarism, most want to know about how to detect it more effectively, not how to prevent it. When I talk to students about plagiarism, most want to know about how to beat the tools that detect it (often through very sneaky questioning), not how to actually cite sources.

In my experience, only the most inept or lazy students get caught plagiarizing trivially. Most are aware of the detection methods used and will either plagiarize from a source under the radar, such as a bought essay from another student, or by modifying it heavily enough to avoid detection, which can only be done with great effort in most case.

In short, students who want to plagiarize can do so with little fear of getting caught. It is just a matter of increasing the effort put into it. However, with anti-plagiarism tools available, no student should want to plagiarize at all because the effort and time required to avoid detection is equal to or greater than the effort of creating an original work.

It seems illogical for students plagiarize but many still do. With either fear of getting caught or a difficult task staring down at them, one would expect students would respond with honesty. However, that is clearly not always the case.

The Climate of Fear

I remember when I was in college, one of my English classes had a very tense day. The instructor told the class that she could not return the papers from the previous week as plagiarism had been detected in one of them. The teacher invited to the student involved to come forward, assumedly to receive a lighter punishment.

The students, all 30 of us, wondered who it was but were more worried that it was us. Many of us began to talk openly about that fear saying things like “I didn’t plagiarize but… I hope it wasn’t me.” The conversation then shifted to specific quotes, missed citations and other mistakes, wondering if that triggered the alarm.

We were informed the next class that the student had come forward and the matter had been handled in private, much to everyone’s collective relief, but I realized that, as students, we were not aware as to what constituted plagiarism. Discussions about citation had been limited to the various styles and we were all unsure where the lines were drawn.

This was the climate that existed in the late 90s. Now, things are much worse as anti-plagiarism systems have become more prominent and are used by more and more schools. However, teachers don’t seem to be any more dedicated to instructing students on issues of plagiarism, at least in many schools, and that is creating a very real sense of fear with the submission of every assignment.

What Teachers Should Be Doing

The first thing educators need to do is focus on actually teaching about plagiarism. Currently, in many schools, the “education” about plagiarism is limited to a few paragraphs in a student handbook.

Writing courses, which are mandatory, need to teach more than just the mechanics of writing a good paper, but also how to cite sources, paraphrase correctly and be a good researcher. It seems simple but there seems to be a divide between what is taught in writing classes and what is useful when creating actual assignments.

Also, instructors need to focus on crafting assignments that are resistant to plagiarism. This includes topics that can not be easily copy/pasted and including in-class portions that test knowledge away from access to outside sources.

Finally, there needs to be a recognition that there will always be a plagiarism problem and that it can not be “stamped out”. The same as there are viruses and bacteria in even the healthiest person, there will always be some cheating, even in the most honest school.

If you accept that and deal with the cases that are caught, you’re much better able to ensure that honest students don’t turn to plagiarism further down the road.

Bottom Line

Strict plagiarism enforcement without solid plagiarism education doesn’t make better students, it makes better cheaters.

If schools are going to deal with the epidemic of plagiarism, they need to treat it more like an actual infection and focus on all-around health rather than pumping in more quick fixes. The current path only makes cheaters more resistant to the methods that are used to catch them and creates a climate of fear that is both counter-productive for learning and can actually encourage cheating, since many students feel as if they are being treated as such anyway.

Even worse for copyright holders is that these better cheaters, after graduation (or while in school) often show a high level of disrespect for intellectual property of others. Though not every file sharer or Web plagiarist is/was a plagiarist in school, or vice versa, there is little doubt that rampant plagiarism in an academic environment erodes the respect one has for honesty and other people’s work.

For the sake of academia and the creative world at large, it is crucial that school shift the way they deal with plagiarism and find a more product approach to the problem.

What do you call someone who not only sues someone trying to help them, but does so with terminally flawed legal arguments? An idiot.

There’s really no “nice” way to say it. Using the courtroom as a club against people trying to help you is just plain stupid, even if you have a disagreement with them.

However, that is exactly what children’s book author Elaine Scott is doing to document-sharing site Scribd, suing them for trying to help her better protect her work.

It is a strange and bizarre case not only tests the limits of one’s imagination, but also one that bears a closer examination as it may have an impact on the rights of smaller content creators everywhere.

Background

The case began when Scott found one of her earlier books, financial advice work entitled “Stocks and Bonds, Profits and Losses”, available illegally on Scribd. She filed a DMCA takedown notice and the work was removed but Scott was not satisfied. She filed suit against Scribd with two different accusations.

First, according to Scott, the site itself is a violation of copyright because it “Shamelessly profits from the stolen copyrighted works of innumerable authors” and the creators “Have built a technology that’s broken barriers to copyright infringement on a global scale and in the process have built one of the largest readerships in the world.”

However, it is the second claim that has become the most attention-grabbing. Scribd employs a “takedown stay down” system that prevents infringing works from being reuploaded to the site and her book, once the notice was filed, was added to that database. Scott now also claims that this copyright filtering service is an infringement and that “Scribd doesn’t have the authority to ‘help’ me with anything…. The filtering system is Scribd’s way of asking for forgiveness, rather than permission.”

What ends up tying this entire lawsuit together into a big ball of copyright strangeness is that Scott is being represented by Kiwi Camara, who became famous in copyright circles for his defense of Jammie Thomas in her retrail, which saw her being found liable for $1.92 million in damages for sharing some 24 songs.

When Ashby Jones at the Wall Street Journal called this case a “head scratcher”, he was being polite. This case is, without a doubt, one of the strangest and most befuddling I’ve ever seen.

Analysis

Legally, the case seems to be a non-starter. On the first complaint, the facts of the case line up very closely with the Universal v. Veoh case where the video sharing site Veoh was sued by Universal for enabling users to publish copyrighted content. However, the court threw out the case in September after finding that Veoh had complied with the DMCA and qualified for its safe harbor protection.

Though the ruling in the Veoh case was very specific to the company itself, the facts largely seem to line up. I can attest that Scribd has always responded swiftly to DMCA notices and its copyright filtering system is a further sign of good faith. Scribd is not a popular site among authors and publishers, but that doesn’t make it illegal.

Given that red flag takedowns are virtually meaningless and useless, it is almost certain the courts will favor Scribd on this case. That is, barring a surprise in discovery that shows Scribd had some unexpected level of knowledge or ignored DMCA notices.

The second argument, the one involving the copyright filtering system, also looks to be equally doomed. If the Scribd copyright filter is anything like every other such filter I’ve seen, it operates on fingerprints and not the work itself (doing otherwise requires exponentially more computing power). As such, the facts of that case mirror closely the Turnitin lawsuit, which iParadigms, the makers of Turnitin, won handily.

Turnitin is a plagiarism checking service commonly used by high schools and colleges to look for matching text in student’s paper. As part of the service, it stores a fingerprint of every essay scanned to match against future works. Four students in Virginia objected to this and sued the company but lost with the judge saying that the use of their work was transformative and a fair use.

Even Camara’s argument that “They are building up a valuable asset that nobody else is going to have by taking work from authors without sharing with them the profits,” falls flat. iParadigms is actively selling access to this database and does so to many thousands of institutions. In short, Camara’s worst fears have already been realized in the iParadigms case and the judge still found it to be a fair use.

Whether you agree with that verdict or not, it is clear that it seems to put the Scribd case in a very bad spot.

To be clear, I am not an attorney but these counter-arguments only took me a minute or two to think up. They are patently obvious, especially considering the Veoh case was thrown out mere days before this suit was filed, and it makes this case look doomed to fail. However, that doesn’t mean it won’t have an impact on the copyright climate.

The Real Problem

Copyright filtering services are for the good of both the hosts that offer them and for copyright holders. Hosts don’t have to spend manpower and time removing works via DMCA that can instead be blocked at the gate and copyright holders don’t have to file notices for the same works over and over again.

Though there are some cases where a copyright holder would not want to be in such a database, for example if they only wanted to stop plagiarized uses, not attributed ones, this wasn’t the case for Scott. Since the only use a fingerprinting system has is matching one work against another, for example plagiarism detection or copyright filtering, pretty much any commercial use Scribd had found for its database would have also been beneficial.

However, Scribd has taken no such steps and expressed no intent to do so. It’s matching database, much like YouTube’s, is proprietary and closely guarded. The mere fact that they could do something doesn’t warrant a preemptive strike, especially when what they are accused of possibly doing was found to be a fair use in another case.

What this case might do, however, is make other companies more skittish about developing “takedown stay down” systems. This would likely be a major blow to the smaller artists who lack the resources to file takedown notices on every single misuse of their work but still license their works in a way where such a system would be practical.

This also might have an impact in discouraging companies from entering into areas where takedown notices might be frequent. Faced with the choice of having to spend the manpower to remove every work subject to takedown notice or being sued for a filtering system, some will likely just walk away. This, in turn, could give rise to more legally dubious sites.

After all, if showing good faith either bankrupts your startup or gets you sued, there isn’t much point in showing it at all. It may be more attractive to move to a country with more relaxed regulations and avoid the problem all together.

In short, by suing the people who tried to help her, she may be hurting every other copyright holder in the world.

Bottom Line

In the end, most copyright experts, including Ben Sheffner and Eric Goldman (who many more reasons why the outlook is bleak for Scott) are skeptical about the suit’s future.

Pretty much all of the recent case history goes against Scott in this matter but, more importantly, logic itself is against her.

Though it is understandable that authors and artists want to protect their work and profit from as many uses of their content as practical, suing a company for infringement when they are trying to prevent your work from being infringed is a classic case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. It makes no sense and will only cause more problems, most of them for other copyright holders.

This case is most likely doomed but the sooner it is thrown out the better. The more fear Scott can sew into the providers who act in good faith, the more room others have to grow.

1: Students Reach Settlement in Turnitin Suit

First off today, iParadigms, the makers of the academic plagiarism checking service Turnitin, have settled their lawsuit with a group of Virginia high school students. The group had sued iParadigms for copyright infringement claiming that their continued use of their submitted papers, which are stored in Turnitin’s database for future matching, constituted an infringement.

However, the district court sided with iParadigms, citing both fair use and contractual issues, namely that the students had agreed to the retention of their papers, albeit that they were under 18 at the time and were under the threat of failure in their class. The appeals court agreed on the fair use issue but sent back to the lower court a complaint by iParadigms that one of the students had gained access to the system illegally.

This settlement puts that issue to rest and forbids either side from taking any further legal action, including the anticipated Supreme Court challenge. However, at least one student involved doesn’t seem to be willing to let this go and is looking for students who had their paper placed into the system without their permission.

Still, for now, this one is over.

2: Oprah faces $1 trillon lawsuit

Next up, in a story that was practically made for CopyrightFail, author Damon Lloyd Goffe has sued Oprah for $1.2 trillion (yes, with a “t”) accusing her of plagiarizing his book “A Tome of Poetry” in her Wen-published work “Pieces of my Soul”.

Goffe accuses Oprah of having sold some 650 million copies of the work at $20 a piece and is seeking profits plus interest on the works sold. Good thing Goffe isn’t seeking statutory damages as those would equal, if the maximum damages were awarded for each alleged copy, $97,500,000,000,000 or 97.5 trillion dollars.

It is worth noting that Goffe is filing the suit Pro Se, meaning he is representing himself in the matter. So it seems highly unlikely this suit will go anywhere. This is especially true considering Goffee does not appear to have registered his book with the Copyright Office, a requirement for jurisdiction in a Federal court.

3: The Best Fair-Use Controversy Ever?

Finally today, because it is Friday, I bring to you one of the most interesting fair use debates in a long time.

The pro-marijuana activist organization NORML is being accused of copyright infringement by now-college professor Lisa Jack, who took a series of photos of now-President Barack Obama when he was a freshman in college. NORML took a photo of Obama smoking a tobacco cigarette and edited the photo to replace a marijuana one and used it in a poster with the slogan “Yes We Cannabis”.

Jack is the one who is upset by the use of the image though NORML is claiming that this is a fair use. The case has not moved to a lawsuit phase but many seem to think it will head that way soon.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

1: Court flunks high schoolers’ appeal on plagiarism database

First off today, in a case that has been going on for two years, a Federal Appeals Court ruled that plagiarism detection service Turnitin’s storage of previously checked papers is a fair use, supporting a lower court’s ruling in the matter.

In 2007, students from a Virginia high school sued Turnitin, saying that the copyrights to their essays was being infringed by the product as it stored copies of their essays in a database for matching against future papers. Though students signed a contract permitting this, they were all minors at the time and the contract was signed under threat of failing the course.

The lower court sided with the makers of Turnitin on both the contract and the fair use arguments, however, the Appeals court only addressed the fair use one, finding that Turnitin’s use of the content was transformative, even though it used the whole of the content. The court did not rule on the contract issue.

2: Lawsuit won’t keep ‘New Moon’ from rising

A recent lawsuit filed against “Twilight” author Stephenie Meyer has been attracting a great deal of attention in the literary world today. Meyer is being sued by a former college friend and roommate, who claims to have created the concept for the popular series.

Though initial reports stated that the lawsuit had brought production of the second movie in the series, “New Moon”, to a halt, it appears that is not the case. The movie, which is based upon the book of the same name, is still currently slated for a Nov. 20th release.

Lawsuits such as this one are surprisingly common for popular works but rarely gain any traction. Still, without knowing the facts of the case, it is difficult to make any judgment.

3: Norway Makes it Easier to Go After File-Sharers

Finally today, in further news from Scandinavia, a decision from Norway’s Post and Telecommunications Regulator has paved the way for courts to demand personal information of subscribers from ISPs when the situation demands it.

Noway, previously, had very strict privacy rules that prevented copyright holders from going after file sharers. However, with this decision, the door is open for courts to decide when it is appropriate to force an ISP to give up their subscribers.

Though not the same as Sweden’s IPRED law, discussed previously, it seems that it will likely have many of the same results.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.