Checking for Plagiarism One Sentence at a Time

I/P Updates

LexisNexis has teamed-up with iParadigms to offer "LexisNexis CopyGuard" pattern-matching technology for identifying suspected plagiarism. The service assigns each document a "similarity index" indicating the total percentage of the document containing text originating elsewhere in the Lexis database. It also provides and "Originality Report" that underlines and color codes questionable sentences, with links to the original sources.

But should we be looking for plagiarism sentence by sentence simply because we can?

Musicians know that all great composers steal; documentarian's lament over dissappearing history; and artists are plagued by intellectual property issues. Even technological breakthroughs can be viewed as more of a societal building process than the singular obsessions of lonely geniuses.

According to Stuart P. Green, a professor of law at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, copyright law "protects a primarily economic interest . . .