CNN.com reports on the growth in the market for software which checks for plagiarism:
For years, educators at colleges and universities have marshaled software tools to ensure that their students' work is original.Now, tainted by scandals or leery of the Internet's copy-enabling power, a growing number of newspapers, law firms and other businesses are using data-sifting tools that can cross-check billions of digital documents and swiftly recognise patterns in just seconds.
I picked out from this article the following sites (below) — all of which I will be exploring during the coming term. However the market is growing beyond educational institutions, plagiarism remains a fundamental problem for educators to address. In the UK, the problem isn't made any easier by the Director of the Joint Council for Qualifications, Dr Ellie Johnson Searle, giving an interview which muddied the waters. But there's the much more difficult problem of plagiarism "created" both by brilliant, creative minds such as Coleridge's ('The extent and significance of Coleridge's plagiarism has been debated by scholars since Thomas De Quincey, himself an accomplished borrower, published an exposé in Tait's Magazine a couple of weeks after Coleridge's death. Coleridge copied from the work of Immanuel Kant, F. W. J. Schelling, and A. W. Schlegel. Whether this copying resulted from psychoneuroses, indolence or an over-rich memory is uncertain. What is certain, and more significant, is that Coleridge brought philosophical concerns to English literary criticism, where before they had been in little evidence.' The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism) and the whole issue of unacknowledged inter-textuality ('Any text is a new tissue of past citations.' — Roland Barthes).
