Last week twitterverse had activity around India Today lifting pieces from the Slate magazine and republishing. The editor apologized, later. This is not an isolated incident and has become increasingly common as content becomes a currency for generating revenues. This will become more important as the content volume increases and the legal structure gets
tightened. If you know the alleys of “dark-web”, there are scores of sites who do a hedge between adsense / adwords for a 2-3% margin on incoming vs. outgoing clicks. Most of them rely on a mash-up of content sourced through various means.
Every piece of content on the web is written / created by people who take time to research and write about the topic. Not every body wants to monetize, they just want to write.
Plagiarism is not just for the “commercial” web, but it is becoming increasingly common in the academia where students are lifting texts and adding it to their thesis. One such incident was brought to light in India where a professor and his students at IIT-Kanpur lifted pieces from Wikipedia (come on!) and other journals for their research and are now under reprimand.
Catching plagiarism is not easy without tools. There are a handful of free / paid tools on the web. A few of them are doing great work. But, I think a lot of more can be done and there are large problems to be solved around plagiarism (without going to specifics of the ideas I have). We are looking for entrepreneurs who can build web applications around this problem and build a business on this. If you are geek / scientist / hacker then drop a note and participate in batch 5 of Morpheus.
Read more about Plagiarism at http://www.plagiarism.org/
Picture courtesy Krista76