Illustration: Uday Deb

Academics face this problem every day. PhD theses are just copied and submitted to unsuspecting professors by students. Internet-savvy kids do it all the time for their school project reports.

Yes, I am talking about plagiarism — about lifting reports directly from the Internet and submitting them without acknowledging the sources. However, most webmasters do not recognise that plagiarism is a problem. Their answer is simple. “If you do not want to be copied, do not put it up on the web”. What most people fail to realise is that plagiarism is more than a serious academic problem.

Artists have their paintings stolen, photographs are snapped up, and musicians are aghast to find that their well-composed songs and tunes appear in someone else’s name. Your fantastic blog entry could be attributed to a total stranger.

So how do you find a copycat? All you have to do is do a Google search for a particular phrase used in your report. This should point to a website that has used your precious copy.

For images do an image search with the filename. Internet thieves almost always forget to change the filename of pictures and paintings while stealing your work. A title search is not likely to be successful as these are usually changed. Musicians, too, can do a filename or title search if you suspect someone is quietly copying your original tunes.

Copyscape

Fortunately for us, the web has evolved at a phenomenal rate and there are several tools available to detect plagiarism today. One of the good ones that I noticed was www.copyscape.com. Copyscape allows you to put in the url of your web page in a text field and this will search the web to find out if someone has stolen your work. It is better to sign up for the premium Copyscape as it provides unlimited searches for copies of your web pages and tracks cases of plagiarism with ease.

Copyscape also has another product called Copysentry. This works in real time and you will receive an e-mail the moment the sentry finds a web page of your content put up by another person. Copysentry has two packages. In the standard package your pages are checked every week for $4.95 for a maximum of 10 pages. You are charged 25 cents a month for each additional page. The Copysentry Professional is your best option if you are really worried about plagiarism. The charge is around $19.95 for 10 pages and $1 for each additional page a month.

Turnitin

There is a wonderful site called www.turnitin.com. All teachers have to do is have their students submit their essays and reports to the site and the site reports back what percentage of the work is original. Turnitin is recognised worldwide as an industry standard tool to prevent plagiarism. Turnitin searches billions of current and archived pages and comes up with an exhaustive report.

PlagiatInform 1.0

A software released just a couple of months ago has got plagiarists spending sleepless nights. Brought out by a Russian company called SearchInform Technologies, this software is currently being used by many publishing houses. The software has the ability to detect suspect passages from whole documents. This is really a boon for the book publishing industry. Try out the site for this software at www.searchinform.com. I think it is a worthwhile buy to detect and expose plagiarists.

iThenticate

This software has been around for a while. Unlike some other plagiarism detection systems, iThenticate requires no installation of software. iThenticate is completely web-based. Compatibility between different computers and operating systems is never a problem. Most law firms, corporations and publishing houses have been trying out this software to check the originality of their documents.

iThenticate and Turnitin belong to the same company. Turnitin is used mostly by educators, but for companies, law firms and publishing houses iThenticate is better. Check the website www.ithenticate.com

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