Monday, November 18, 2002		Feature

Stealing ideas online
Peeyush Agnihotri

IMAGINE how would you feel if someone were to palm off something as his that belonged to you? Distressed, annoyed, cheated, infuriated or exasperated? Or all at once.

Blame the WWW for all this, though those accused of plagiarism might say plainly that they took it from the Net, and thus it’s not plagiarism. This, however, is no answer. Plagiarism is plagiarism, whether copying is done manually or electronically. It is wrong and on the rise.

Musicians ripped off originals and called them remixes. Artists added a bit of ‘this’ and ‘that’ and said they were ‘inspired’ by the masters. With the vast availability of original material on the Net and in other electronic forms, ‘borrowing’ from the original is all too common and all-pervasive, in academia, in journalism and even in creative arts. Thus you have journalists trying to sound original with their stolen stories. They are hooking cyber-kundis to light their own bulbs of originality. Everything, like the text, is virtual, except the byline.

Cyber plagiarism has become a point of concern for intelligentsia worldwide. A Berkeley study says that there was a rise of 744 per cent in online plagiarism during the initial years of the Internet. A department of journalism chairman in the UK is quoted as saying: "There’s no room for plagiarism in any field, but in journalism, plagiarism results in the loss of journalists’ credibility."

Learning institutions

The same goes for the field of education and arts. The cut-paste temptation is too hard to resist. Right from junior wing students in schools to Ph.D. scholars in universities, almost everyone is relying on what’s already on the Net.

A faculty member from one of Panjab University’s science departments confides: "Net has made the task of writing a Ph.D. thesis easy. Students these days are not subject experts but are computer experts. They copy verbatim from the Net with the probability of getting caught being almost nil, since most of the research has been done abroad. Even if they are caught the aggrieved party can just raise a ruckus. That’s all. The student can’t be penalised legally.

Webster traces the root of this word, plagiarism, to Greek origin, with plagios meaning treacherous. Plaga in Latin stands for kidnappers who made off with other’s child (read creation). Today, plagiarism means taking away someone else’s original work and passing it off as your own. Is there a difference between a child and original work? Ask those at the receiving end.

Catching Weblifters

The information era has made plagiarism easy. All the ‘creative’ fellow has to do is to take the e-Net and fish in the cyber sea. What’s more, great souls do not bother to rehash it. Cut-and-paste is all they do. What, however, they forget is that the Net is a double-edged sword. If it makes the lifter’s job easy, it does the same for detecting and reporting cyber thefts.

Recently, leading physicists of Stanford University, USA, wrote to the President of India and top government officials accusing Kumaon University’s VC B.S. Rajput of plagiarising their works. The plagiarism was detected and reported by a Website, physicsplagiarmalert, hosted and backed by top physicists.

Software like Copycatch, Copyfind, Wordcheck keyword, EVE (essay verification engine), Glatt plagiarism services and MOSS (measure of software similarity) are easily available to detect wrongdoings. There is also online assistance, both paid and unpaid, from sites like plagiarism.org and turnitin.com to name a few (see box for list).

When the text is submitted for checking, digital fingerprints are taken for checking replication and paraphrasing with millions of other documents available on the Web. However, software detection program can only search just a portion of the Internet. There are chances that even though the original text might exist on the Net, software programs may not be able to lay their hands on them. Research has shown that the combined Web coverage of 11 search engines could yield only 42 per cent accuracy.

Plagiarism detection programs use algorithms and though they are powerful, they cannot detect all kinds of stealing.

Cyber laws

Ali Hasnain, a cyber law expert, says there are no specific sections that deal with the issue. "So we lawyers have to read between the lines to come up with interpretations. Usually Sections 65 and 66 of the IT Act are used. Section 66 is more general in nature and covers the issue of plagiarism more effectively as compared to Section 65. This is so because the Section recognises that if a person were to diminish the utility or value of any information he would be liable to be punished under this Section and in the context of the intellectual property laws any person infringing the author’s copyright is effectively diminishing the value of his work. If proved, the copycat may be penalised up to Rs 2 lakh or three years imprisonment or both," Ali says. Ouch! The after-effects of cyber plagiarism can be as real as those of traditional plagiarism.