Roger Kreuz

From what I can tell, it's never been easier to get away with plagiarism simply because so much material is being produced every year.

Think about the number of books, the number of songs, the number of stories that are published each year.

It's a vast amount.

And people aren't out there chucking.

In many cases, the plagiarism that does exist was discovered by accident.

It's very common, for example, for a fan of a certain artist to say, gee, that sounds just like my favorite song.

I'm going to write to the original artist and ask them if they're aware of this.

And that's how it comes to the attention, for example, of somebody who has been infringed upon.

So because there aren't people out there really checking for it, and so much information is being produced, so many texts, so many songs are being produced, it really makes it relatively easy to escape detection.

It really is the case that unless people are looking, they're going to get away with it.

On the other side, our tools for finding it are better than ever.

So many students who have gone through college in the last 20 years or so

have had to deal with a program called Turnitin, where an instructor can actually upload a paper written by a student and then the service compares that paper to a vast warehouse of documents that already exist and can then create a similarity score.

And then it's up to the instructor to decide, is this amount of copying inadvertent or was it deliberate?

It gets very tricky for a lot of instructors, and they find themselves really conflicted about making accusations of plagiarism when in some cases that may not be appropriate.

There's only so many ways to tell about the childhood of Abraham Lincoln.

There's only so many stories you can tell there.

And they're going to be similar because they're based upon the same historical facts.

But whether or not people were actually cribbing from other people's books, that's the issue.

And that is a defense that many people have used who have been litigated against.