Plagiarists

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Tuesday | June 5, 2001

Feeding off others Plagiarists abound in a cut-and-paste environment 05/31/2001 By PAULA FELPS / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

ONLINE PAPER MILLS MAKE CHEATING EASIER If you copy from one person, it's cheating. If you copy from two or more, it's research – or so the old saying goes. These days, both are easier to do but harder to get away with.

Students have been lifting information for term papers and reports for as long as teachers have been making assignments. For many, the advent of the Internet has seemed like an information free-for-all.

Where they once might have resorted to paying someone to write a term paper, students now find that online resources make it quicker and easier to locate the particular assignment already written – for a fee, of course.

According to the site Plagiarism.org, about 30 percent of all students plagiarize on every term paper turned in. A state-by-state breakdown of cybercheating, based on papers tested through the site's Turnitin.com program, shows Texas as having a significant amount of digital plagiarism, ranking 7 on a scale of 1 to 12. Kansas and Oklahoma show "very significant" amounts of cheating. Iowa ranks among the states with the lowest number of digital plagiarism reports.

The site points to online paper mills as perpetrators of plagiarism, with sites such as SchoolSucks.com offering a digital library of reports for students.

Plagiarism.org's most recent research found more than 200 sites that cater to students looking for shortcuts. Some, such as the Evil House of Cheat, also provide tips on how to cheat digitally without getting caught.

Some sites have proved so popular that they are expanding to overseas markets, offering papers in different languages.

Sites such as Plasmodium.com offer "resources for students" and a stern warning about plagiarism, but also provide a large stock of pre-written papers for $15 – more for custom-written papers.

As rampant as information swapping appears to be, there are numerous ways for teachers and parents to track it down.

In addition to Plagiarism.org's Turnitin.com, Digital Integrity offers a tool called FindSame ( www.findsame.com), which performs a similar service, searching the Web for matching sentences.

IntegriGuard ( www.integriguard.com) provides free plagiarism checks through its HowOriginal.com tool.

And Glatt Plagiarism Services ( plagiarism.com) produces three programs to help detect plagiarized works. Last September, lind Mays was enjoying success as the author of the e-book How You Can Make Money at Home when she learned that her work was being sold on another Web site – under another writer's name. "Several people who had read my e-book e-mailed me and told me that someone was selling a book that was exactly like the book I had written and promoted for the past two years," says Ms. Mays, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"That version of my e-book was being sold alongside my book at Booklocker.com, as well as at the plagiarizer's Web site."

So began Ms. Mays' frustrating attempts to fight the newest form of piracy: online plagiarism.

The Internet has added infinite possibilities for writers, but it also has launched a platform for headaches and lawsuits, with copyright violations being committed both innocently and intentionally on Web sites designed for personal and business use.

Most recently, the University of Virginia was rocked by scandal when 122 students were found to have plagiarized term papers for a physics class.

Physics professor Louis Bloomfield was alerted to the widespread practice by a student who received a low score on his paper and complained that other students had received their grades unfairly.

After searching the Internet, Dr. Bloomfield discovered about 60 papers that perfectly matched online term papers and found 62 more that had several phrases that matched online resources.

The students, some of whom have already graduated from the university, now face the possibility of losing their degrees, and undergraduates may be expelled.

Adair-Hoy, founder of the Maine-based e-publishing house Booklocker.com and publisher of the weekly newsletter Writers Weekly.com, says she has seen the scope of plagiarism broaden with the advent of the Internet.

Plagiarists abound in a cut-and-paste environment• Try out a program to detect plagiarism• Extra content index

Cases such as Ms. Mays', where an author obviously copies the work of another and puts his name on it, are extreme and rare. However, less malicious incidents are rampant in cyberspace.

"In most cases, it's obvious that people are just ignorant about the laws involved in using copyrighted information," Ms. Adair-Hoy says.

"In that case, you just have to perform a little tough love and educate them. In those cases, if you write to the Web site and tell them they have 24 hours to remove the content from their site, most of the time they're going to comply."

For example, WritersWeekly. com, which is distributed via e-mail and also appears on her site, provides writers with updated paying markets each week. Ms. Adair-Hoy has a system for checking into each job opportunity and writes the listings herself.

"I've found my material on other [writers'] job markets pages and have had to tell them to remove that content from their site. There are laws and guidelines all over the Internet about this type of thing," she says. "Before people put something on their Web site, they should look up the fair use laws online."

Even on eBay

A. ' book, How to Make & Market Gel Candles That Sell Like Wildfire!, is a Booklocker.com best seller. But last year, the author discovered photographs from her book on the auction site eBay being used to promote the pamphlets of another gel candle maker. "Here were pictures that she had taken in her own house being used to promote someone else's work," Ms. Adair-Hoy says.

"There obviously was no question as to where they had gotten them, so she e-mailed them and told them they could not use those photos."

Although outright rip-offs are more frequent in the printed world, cyberspace has made it easier for plagiarists to cut and paste. Some sites believe it is acceptable to use someone else's work as long as they credit the author, and in some instances, that's true.

"One woman I know found her work online at an educational site and found out they could [legally] do that because it was a nonprofit school," Ms. Adair-Hoy says.

"So there are instances like that where it's acceptable. Basically, though, if people are going to use someone else's work, they need to attribute it to the source. You've got to do your own research and, obviously, don't steal someone else's book."

Big names affected

It's not just small companies and authors who are having trouble keeping track of who's selling – or using – their words. Earlier this year, Random House filed suit against e-publisher Rosetta Books, claiming the smaller company violated copyrights when it published electronic versions of several Random House titles.

Rosetta Books, meanwhile, maintains that the copyrights belong to the authors, not Random House. The case is currently pending.

An even bigger online headache occurred last year when King's e-book Riding the Bullet was hacked and posted on several Web sites. That prompted many e-book publishers to look at encryption and other anti-hacking strategies.

"Writers need to be better educated on situations like this and what they can do to prevent them," says Ms. Mays, who still is having disputes over the rights to her book with the author who pilfered it. "[They need to know] what they can do to protect and win their case and alternatives to going to court – and there are alternatives."

In the case of her book, the other author, Cheryline Lawson, originally said that it was a mistake and that she was unaware of Ms. Mays' book.

"[i thought] this must be someone who is new to writing and publishing, and is not well-versed in copyright laws or the ethics of plagiarism," Ms. Mays recalls.

"I was so sure she would have been just plain embarrassed and apologetic and humiliated. I was worried that I had humiliated this person, and I didn't want to do something like that, not to someone who made a mistake and just didn't know what she was doing."

But when Ms. Mays' publishing company produced receipts indicating Ms. Lawson had purchased the plagiarized book, Ms. Mays went from sympathetic to angry.

"I then knew she had done this on purpose," she says. "I no longer felt that I was humiliating someone. I felt like a victim."

Ms. Lawson did not respond to requests for an interview.

Although the Internet makes it easier to swipe someone else's work, it also makes retaliation easier and swifter.

In the case of the pilfered e-book, Ms. Mays reacted by sending out notices to people who had bought the plagiarized version and sites that sold the book and explained the situation in the Writers Weekly.com newsletter. Other sites stopped selling Ms. Lawson's version of the book, and some readers sent e-mail to Ms. Lawson expressing their disapproval and disappointment.

Ms. Mays says she is not the first person to have her words lifted from cyberspace nor will she be the last. The new media will continue raising new questions about plagiarism and copyrights, while at the same time making plagiarism easier to commit – but also easier to detect.

Students caught

That is evidenced in the University of Virginia case, where Dr. Bloomfield was able to go online and find examples of plagiarism simply by typing in a few phrases. Today, there are a number of Web sites designed to help teachers catch cybercheaters, and many of them also can be accessed by the public.

For example, Plagiarism.org is a Web site originally designed so that college professors could enter questionable portions of students' term papers into the system, which then would search the Internet for matching phrases or sentences.

Ms. Adair-Hoy says she has used the site to find her own articles being used online without her permission, and Ms. Mays believes that more technology will be developed to protect writers against plagiarism.

"I'm sure we'll see lots of cases," Ms. Mays says.

"Wherever money or profit is involved, there will always be disputes. Since we are venturing into a new realm, new mistakes will be made. As with any new commodity, one must find the boundaries, and the laws must be laid down."

a Felps is a free-lance writer from ville.

MM / NSIF

Martha Murdock, DirectorNational Silicone Implant FoundationDallas, Texas Headquarters

Purposes for which the Corporation (NSIF) is organized are to perform the charitable activities within the meaning of Internal Revenue Code Section 501©(3) and Texas Tax Code Section 11.18 ©(1).Specifically, the Corporation is organized for the purposes of education and research of Ilicone-related disease.

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