It seems an absurdity that in this day and age you can have a plagiarism scandal over a highly publicized book.
The proposed tool would run your submitted material versus copyrighted material, most of which is already digtized, and report worrisome areas, especially outright copies of text.
This would be immensely helpful to those who claim to have "internalized" texts, and of course to publishers-- theircompetitor, May 04 2006 Spider Robinson & Melancholy Elephants http://en.wikipedia...iki/Spider_Robinson [theircompetitor, May 05 2006] A central database of digitized (and OCR'ed) copyrighted material doesn't exist yet, though. Right?-- jutta, May 04 2006 There are already services for scanning submitted texts against known sources on the Internet. This is primarily intended for professors trying to detect plagiarism amongst students, but is probably also useful for news services.
And it is word matches that count. I don't think people are really concerned about plagiarism where someone has totally rewritten someone else's story. Shakespeare, after all, based all his plays on the works of others; he just did it better and more memorably.
I think what we're seeing is a flurry of young authors and journalists who came of age with the Internet, and the ready access to other people's writings, but before the plagiarism tools got toothy, and thus they sailed through school/early jobs unaware that wholesale copying could have any consequences.
(The Raytheon is another story altogether: bosses have long gotten away with taking credit for other people's work, and I think the guy simply forgot which bits came from people who didn't work for him. After all, the book itself was compiled by one of his staff.)-- DrCurry, May 04 2006 [jutta] I was thinking a fair amount of it does exist -- given Amazon's online tools and Google's recent disputes with publishers.
And of course, DC, if they would only use the summarization features in Word, they might come up with entirely new stuff :)-- theircompetitor, May 04 2006 [brau] we're talking about copied passages, not Dan Brown type controversies.
However, you may want to check out "Melancholy Elephants". Great story.-- theircompetitor, May 05 2006 This recent controversy has gobsmacked me. The young author seems entirely credible and her explanation reasonable. I contrast the frenzy over her use of the word "woodsy" in a sentence, the cancellation of her contract etc, with the total continuing silence over the Walt Disney company's shameless appropriation of 'Junguru Taishi' (KIMBA) into the 'Lion King'. If the young lady had a caucasian face and name, I wonder.....-- ConsulFlaminicus, May 05 2006 I will just point out that the whole book was "packaged" - i.e., someone else came up with the idea, the storyline, the characters, etc., then gave it to Kaavya Viswanathan to actually write, mostly because she's a hot chick that would appeal to their target demographic (other hot chicks). The plagiarized material came from books by another author employed by the same packaging company. The whole thing is so cynical, who really cares if the plagiarism was deliberate or subconscious?
It's like arguing about the provenance of bodice rippers.-- DrCurry, May 05 2006 My teachers have always claimed this does exist, and they use it, but i don't know if it was just for intimidation. it wouldn't surprise me if this existed in a simpler sense.-- fuzz2050, Nov 06 2006 random, halfbakery