E-books and e-publishing | Page 8

Enter Turnit.com. An off-shoot
of www.iparadigms.com, it was established by a group of concerned
(and commercially minded) scientists from UC Berkeley. Whereas
digital rights and asset management systems are geared to prevent
piracy - plagiarism.org and its commercial arm, Turnit.com, are the
cyber equivalent of a law enforcement agency, acting after the fact to
discover the culprits and uncover their misdeeds. This, they claim, is a
first stage on the way to a plagiarism-free Internet-based academic
community of both teachers and students, in which the educational
potential of the Internet can be fully realized. The problem is especially
severe in academia. Various surveys have discovered that a staggering
80%(!) of US students cheat and that at least 30% plagiarize written
material. The Internet only exacerbated this problem. More than 200
cheat- sites have sprung up, with thousands of papers available on- line
and tens of thousands of satisfied plagiarists the world over. Some of
these hubs - like cheater.com, cheatweb or cheathouse.com - make no
bones about their offerings. Many of them are located outside the USA
(in Germany, or Asia) and at least one offers papers in a few languages,
Hebrew included. The problem, though, is not limited to the ivory
towers. E- zines plagiarize. The print media plagiarize. Individual

journalists plagiarize, many with abandon. Even advertising agencies
and financial institutions plagiarize. The amount of material out there is
so overwhelming that the plagiarist develops a (fairly justified) sense of
immunity. The temptation is irresistible, the rewards big and the
pressures of modern life great. Some of the plagiarists are
straightforward copiers. Others substitute words, add sentences, or
combine two or more sources. This raises the question: "when should
content be considered original and when - plagiarized?". Should the test
for plagiarism be more stringent than the one applied by the Copyright
Office? And what rights are implicitly granted by the material's genuine
authors or publishers once they place the content on the Internet? Is the
Web a public domain and, if yes, to what extent? These questions are
not easily answered. Consider reports generated by users from a
database.
Are these reports copyrighted - and if so, by whom - by the database
compiler or by the user who defined the parameters, without which the
reports in question would have never been generated? What about "fair
use" of text and works of art? In the USA, the backlash against digital
content piracy and plagiarism has reached preposterous legal, litigious
and technological nadirs. Plagiarism.org has developed a
statistics-based technology (the "Document Source Analysis") which
creates a "digital fingerprint" of every document in its database. Web
crawlers are then unleashed to scour the Internet and find documents
with the same fingerprint and a colour-coded report is generated. An
instructor, teacher, or professor can then use the report to prove
plagiarism and cheating. Piracy is often considered to be a form of viral
marketing (even by software developers and publishers). The author's,
publisher's, or software house's data are preserved intact in the cracked
copy. Pirated copies of e-books often contribute to increased sales of
the print versions. Crippled versions of software or pirated copies of
software without its manuals, updates and support - often lead to the
purchase of a licence. Not so with plagiarism. The identities of the
author, editor, publisher and illustrator are deleted and replaced by the
details of the plagiarist. And while piracy is discussed freely and fought
vigorously - the discussion of plagiarism is still taboo and actively
suppressed by image-conscious and endowment-weary academic
institutions and media. It is an uphill struggle but plagiarism.org has

taken the first resolute step.

The Miraculous Conversion By: Sam Vaknin
http://www.ideavirus.com The recent bloodbath among online content
peddlers and digital media proselytisers can be traced to two deadly
sins. The first was to assume that traffic equals sales. In other words,
that a miraculous conversion will spontaneously occur among the
hordes of visitors to a web site. It was taken as an article of faith that a
certain percentage of this mass will inevitably and nigh hypnotically
reach for their bulging pocketbooks and purchase content, however
packaged. Moreover, ad revenues (more reasonably) were assumed to
be closely correlated with "eyeballs". This myth led to an obsession
with counters, page hits, impressions, unique visitors, statistics and
demographics. It failed, however, to take into account the dwindling
efficacy of what Seth Godin, in his brilliant essay ("Unleashing the
IdeaVirus"), calls "Interruption Marketing" - ads, banners, spam and
fliers. It also ignored, at its peril, the ethos of free content and open
source prevalent among the Internet opinion leaders, movers and
shapers. These two neglected aspects of Internet hype and culture led to
the trouncing of erstwhile promising web media companies while their
business models were exposed as wishful thinking. The second mistake
was