Korean University Develops Anti-Plagiarism Software

The Korean Times reports that Korea University has developed a program that can help detect plagiarism. The software, which “picks paragraphs at random and compares them to other sources found on the Google search engine”, was designed to detect plagiarism by students but has obvious benefits for other content creators wanting to keep control on how their work is used.

The people who would be most helped by this software are creators of longer text works such as short stories and lengthy essays. For them, regular Google searches are of limited value because, often times, only parts of the work are stolen. If you don’t happen to search for that individual piece, the theft goes undetected.

However, my skeptical side points out that the software largely duplicates the efforts of Copyscape and other mainstream plagiarism detection programs. The main difference here seems to be that it’s in Korean, not English.

Still, it’s nice to see software being developed to help with the fight against plagiarism. In the end, software is the greatest tool we have in the battle against online plagiarism and we need all of the help we can get.