Comments on: FamousPlagiarists.com–and an e-book angle http://www.teleread.com/uncategorized/famous-plargiarists-and-an-e-book-angle/ News & views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:55:20 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Garson Poole http://www.teleread.com/uncategorized/famous-plargiarists-and-an-e-book-angle/comment-page-1/#comment-966 Garson Poole Sat, 25 Jun 2005 10:37:52 +0000 http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=3101#comment-966 I agree that word-crunching all the Project Gutenberg to look for plagiarism would be interesting. Current plagiarists are apparently blissfully unaware that the probability of detection is growing rapidly, and that it will be nearly unavoidable in the future. The corpus of documents available in electronic form is enormous and rapidly expanding. Even primitive tools such as "Google" give a preview of the speed and power of search on huge databases. First generation companies specializing in detecting plagiarism such as turnitin.com already exist. Intellectuals have been remarkably tardy in demanding that the Library of Congress electronically scan its entire collection for easy and universal access. Certainly, this should be done immediately for all documents in the public domain. Also, for full-text searching and indexing purposes it should be done for all documents even those which are copyrighted. Optical character recognition is an imperfect technology, but it allows the extraction of searchable text from scanned printed documents with 98 or 99 percent accuracy. This is adequate for finding verbatim and near-verbatim plagiarism of text passages through the use of flexible approximate matching algorithms. (It will not, however, catch extensive paraphrasing.) New automated tools will help shame thieving miscreants by comparing candidate documents against all the documents in a super-corpus which includes the current web, archives such as the "Wayback machine" archive.org, and the printed texts in Library of Congress. Historians will be able to judge the "originality" of historical figures and previous historians with perhaps fascinating revelations. (Note: I did not plagirize this comment. I wrote it back in January 2003 at another website and thought it would be appropriate here also.) I agree that word-crunching all the Project Gutenberg to look for plagiarism would be interesting. Current plagiarists are apparently blissfully unaware that the probability of detection is growing rapidly, and that it will be nearly unavoidable in the future. The corpus of documents available in electronic form is enormous and rapidly expanding. Even primitive tools such as “Google” give a preview of the speed and power of search on huge databases. First generation companies specializing in detecting plagiarism such as turnitin.com already exist.

Intellectuals have been remarkably tardy in demanding that the Library of Congress electronically scan its entire collection for easy and universal access. Certainly, this should be done immediately for all documents in the public domain. Also, for full-text searching and indexing purposes it should be done for all documents even those which are copyrighted.

Optical character recognition is an imperfect technology, but it allows the extraction of searchable text from scanned printed documents with 98 or 99 percent accuracy. This is adequate for finding verbatim and near-verbatim plagiarism of text passages through the use of flexible approximate matching algorithms. (It will not, however, catch extensive paraphrasing.)

New automated tools will help shame thieving miscreants by comparing candidate documents against all the documents in a super-corpus which includes the current web, archives such as the “Wayback machine” archive.org, and the printed texts in Library of Congress. Historians will be able to judge the “originality” of historical figures and previous historians with perhaps fascinating revelations.

(Note: I did not plagirize this comment. I wrote it back in January 2003 at another website and thought it would be appropriate here also.)

]]> By: David Rothman http://www.teleread.com/uncategorized/famous-plargiarists-and-an-e-book-angle/comment-page-1/#comment-918 David Rothman Fri, 24 Jun 2005 06:48:40 +0000 http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=3101#comment-918 Oh, but that is one of my favorite movies! Clearly Frank Abagnale's plagiarism of his victims' signatures fell outside fair use guidelines. Oh, but that is one of my favorite movies! Clearly Frank Abagnale’s plagiarism of his victims’ signatures fell outside fair use guidelines.

]]> By: Albert Z http://www.teleread.com/uncategorized/famous-plargiarists-and-an-e-book-angle/comment-page-1/#comment-903 Albert Z Thu, 23 Jun 2005 21:48:13 +0000 http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=3101#comment-903 And let's now forget about Frank Abbagnale, the subject of the recent "Catch me if you can" with Di Caprio and Tom Hanks. I really liked that movie because it clearly showed what a clever man can do with his plagiarist skills :) And let’s now forget about Frank Abbagnale, the subject of the recent “Catch me if you can” with Di Caprio and Tom Hanks. I really liked that movie because it clearly showed what a clever man can do with his plagiarist skills :)

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