Plagiarism-Finder ($129.95 USD, trial version available) - software compares term-papers (or other writings) with the Web to find plagiarism.

I checked this out by analyzing a 16 week PHP course that I wrote back in 2000 that unfortunately has been pirated several times over the years. Some pirates are pretty shifty and change all references of my name as the author (and copyright holder) as well as strip out any links to the demo/example code (referencing me/my websites again) and some are stupid and just copy everything verbatim. Abuse departments at hosting companies take this stuff very seriously so it’s relatively easy to get this type of stuff taken down.

So I submitted the text of week one of this course material and ran it through Plagiarism Finder and within two minutes it discovered a new pirate that we hadn’t yet discovered! This thief, according to the contact info, is from Ireland and the site claims to provide “professional, commercial PHP software and webmaster resources” — I wonder what/who else they ripped off? Yeah, that’s pretty professional behavior alright. Not.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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