MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Famous CC-licensed novel taken down by SFWA

nekokami · 09-04-2007, 07:22 PM

There's a fairly simple technological method for checking the originality of written material -- it's much easier than "audio fingerprinting," for example. Commercial anti-plagiarism services like TurnItIn are able to provide reports that can tell you exactly what has been plagiarized, and where the material came from.

However, for TurnItIn to work, there has to be a reference site containing the content. If the publishers would submit all their digital works (that they want to protect) to TurnItIn, or provide an API to a similar service, they could reasonably require online sites such as Scribd to check content against such a database, just as Google is now being pressured into checking for the authorship of video content it accepts through YouTube. I think this would be a lot more constructive (and effective) than arguing about whose responsibility it is to police such sites.

09-04-2007, 07:22 PM	#8
nekokami fruminous edugeek Posts: 6,745 Karma: 551260 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Northeast US Device: iPad, eBw 1150	There's a fairly simple technological method for checking the originality of written material -- it's much easier than "audio fingerprinting," for example. Commercial anti-plagiarism services like TurnItIn are able to provide reports that can tell you exactly what has been plagiarized, and where the material came from. However, for TurnItIn to work, there has to be a reference site containing the content. If the publishers would submit all their digital works (that they want to protect) to TurnItIn, or provide an API to a similar service, they could reasonably require online sites such as Scribd to check content against such a database, just as Google is now being pressured into checking for the authorship of video content it accepts through YouTube. I think this would be a lot more constructive (and effective) than arguing about whose responsibility it is to police such sites.