Internet-based information has had a profound effect on the way people can now educate themselves from a pool of seemingly endless content. It is estimated by the NEC Research Institute that there are more then 1.4 billion pages on the Internet with 25 new pages being added every second (Dyrli 1). With so much available content, the application of the World Wide Web in class education and research has now become common practice in schools and universities. As a result, the Internet has succeeded in its purposes of bringing together information from one part of the World to another.

But like most great advancements in modern technology, the Internet's purposes have become altered and used for other nefarious acts. One of these problems, seemingly perpetuated by the Internet, has been the noticeable increase in plagiarism and academic dishonesty in the realm of education. Plagiarism is nothing new to the academic community, but over the past ten years, the Internet has opened up new ways for students to digitally copy information from web-based sources, some of which that actually encourage plagiarism. The Internet has created new opportunities for students to become better cheaters and as a result created new challenges for educators. In looking at this problem, I would like to examine how the Internet has made cheating more accessible to students, and in turn how educators are using the Internet itself to fight plagiarism.

However, before examining this problem, one must realize that plagiarism does not begin and end with the Internet. The groundwork for plagiarism was laid long before the world was wired together. To better understand how plagiarism became such an accepted practice and why the Internet has only strengthened its hold, we should begin by tracing plagiarism's roots backwards and forward through the spectrum of societal and technological advancements. By building new technologies to spread ideas further and faster we have succeeded in changing and building a new culture based on the absorption of others' ideas. Ideas that cannot be cited due to the obscured view technology puts between the reader and writer.

Plagiarism and Society

Online Ethics defines plagiarism as “appropriating the writings, graphic representation, or ideas of another person to represent them as one's own work without proper attribution” (The Online Ethics…). Plagiarism can be intentional or unintentional with a majority of student's claiming they did not know they needed to site sources in the first place (Logue 40). Plagiarism is not illegal, but all academic institutions have some sort of disciplinary action against it. As opposed to copyright infringement, which is the stealing of others' ideas for financial gain, plagiarism is the stealing of ideas for non-profit use.

Lawrence Lessig in his book “Free Culture” writes that intellectual property theft is wrong when it involves “the taking of something of value from someone without permission”(18). But words in a book have no monetary value to students writing a term paper. If a student were to copy these words they would only be doing so to save time. Because of this, plagiarism is only seen as a violation of academic laziness and not as major an issue as copyright infringement.

Another reason plagiarism is more widely accepted then copyright infringement is because of the nature of the culture in which we live in. Lessig writes that our free culture leaves much open for others' to build their own ideas upon (Lessig 30). Taking the successful work of a competitor and piggybacking on the material with an original take, such as Disney taking Brothers Grimm and Buster Keaton material as inspiration for their own animated films, has occurred within the media and entertainment industries for years (Lessig 23). Major industries use of others' ideas as a springboard for their own, may leave the impression upon students that it's ok to use the ideas of another. But the distinction between this practice and plagiarism lies with how much creativity is injected into an already original idea as opposed to just a carbon copy.

Students feel that plagiarizing is not stealing, instead their views on plagiarism are based on how non-credited information is presented daily by the media or on the Internet (Wood 3). The lack of scholarly standards in accrediting work in our media saturated environment is part of the world that a new generation is growing up in (Wood 3). Today's values have much to do with how plagiarism is viewed and why it is practiced. But technology has provided plagiarists with the means to accomplish it. One of the very first communication technologies, writing, played the most important role in how plagiarism would develop in the future.

Plagiarism and Writing

One of the first recorded instances of plagiarism occurred in AD 561 when an Irish monk named Finnian lent another monk named Colmcille a religious manuscript that Finnian had written and illustrated. Colmcille, impressed by Finnian's work, proceeded to copy the words from the manuscript before retuning it to Finnian. Upon finding out about Colmcille's deed, Finnian demanded that the copy be returned as he claimed exclusive rights to his work (Logue 40). Prior to the development of writing, Colmcille's plagiarism would not have been possible. But when ideas and thoughts were able to spill forth from a writer's head through the written and printed word, plagiarism then became a reality.

In his book “Orality and Literacy”, Walter J. Ong pegged the development of script or true writing around 3500 B.C. in Mesopotamia (84). Ong writes: “the critical and unique breakthrough into new worlds of knowledge was achieved within human consciousness..…when a coded system of visible marks was invented whereby a writer could determine the exact words that a reader would generate from the text” (84). This new avenue allowed previously safe ideas locked in a writer's head to be exposed in a tangible manner. It also allowed Ong's description of writing to be turned around where a reader could use the exact words that a writer could generate for a text.

The development of writing was also the first layer of communication technology to start the process of isolationism between reader and writer. Ong has written that the context of ideas being shared in oral form can be different from how they are shared in written form. An element of depersonalization is always present in writing when compared to speech (Ong 82). Without the emotion and intonation of a speaker's voice in writing, a reader could then feel as though the information presented in the writing lacks a voice and thereby an owner.

Writing allowed people to externalize their own ideas in a physical form that could be shared with others, but it also provided a physical form that could be copied by others without regret due to the disembodied and impersonal nature of writing. This process is key to understanding how the Internet has influenced the rise of plagiarism on campuses around the nation.

Plagiarism and the Internet

Using the Internet to copy and paste information out of online works and into word-processed research papers has become known as “cyber-plagiarism” (Lathrop and Foss 18), or as some English teachers like to call it “patchwork plagiarism.” (Benning A1). A 2003 study conducted at 23 college campuses by the Center for Academic Integrity, found that 38 percent of undergraduate students had used the Internet for plagiarizing work in one or more instances in the past year (Rimer). Cyber-plagiarism is not just limited to college either. A 2001 Center for Academic Integrity survey of 4,500 high school students found more then half had copy and pasted or downloaded material for use in their own work (Hafner 1). This liberal use of cutting and pasting has much to do with the added layer of isolationism the Internet contributes to the reader/writer relationship.

David Levy in his book “Scrolling Forward” discusses some of the differences a book can have over an on-line print edition. Books in their physical shape can retain some aspect of humanization. Levy describes his copy of a book as “the product of many hands, and the embodiment of a number of interpretations” (47). He continues by saying he sees a book as “less as an isolated, static object than as a constituent in an ongoing process of literary production, revision, and renewal” (47). Internet pages, however, are found in the wide expanses of cyberspace among millions of other pages just like it. Because of their non-physical nature, these online writings can deny the reader the physical bond they share with a book.

When we visit a web page, we often cannot identify with where the material came from, as there are no citations of sources. This gives the impression the writing was mechanically produced without any human input. It is this perceived artificialness of writing on a web page that makes it easier for students to plagiarize, as it is an even more anonymous source then a book. It could even be assumed that students who plagiarize from the Internet are not even aware they are plagiarizing a real person's ideas, as they feel no connection between the writer and the content blinking on the screen. But often times it is the Internet content itself that promotes the cheating.

Internet Paper Mills

Internet paper mills are services that provide data bases of already written papers that cover thousands of subjects (Dyrli 1). By simply typing in “term paper” in an Internet search engine students can gain access to the over fifty online paper mill sites on the web (Austin and Brown 22). Some of these services are small volunteer sites that collect student papers into a free data base while the others are large commercially run sites that offer toll free numbers, credit card options and same day delivery of papers (Dyrli 1). Fees to view material on the commercial sites can run between $5 and $9 per page (Dyrli 1). Some sites will even offer to write custom papers at a cost per page, which often times will exceed over $100 a paper (Lathrop and Foss 18). The founder of online paper mill schoolsucks.com, Kenney Sahr, says that “10,000 people visit School Sucks every day, and each views three to five papers” (Dyrli 1). With such an obvious influence on students from online paper mills, universities and states have begun to question their legality.

Seventeen states have laws that make it illegal to sell term papers to students (Austin and Brown 23). Specifically these laws state, “if there is the expectation that (the research material) will be submitted for academic credit” (Dyrli 2). Because of such legal entanglement, online paper mills now carry disclaimers that their papers are for research only and that students are not to use them for the purposes of turning them in as their own (Lathrop and Foss 18). The operators of online paper mills believe that first amendment rights under the articles of free speech protect their services and that reviewing old term papers “is no different then studying old test papers stored in fraternity and sorority files”( Dyrli 2).

Boston University attorney Robert Smith, who unsuccessfully tried suing several online paper mills in 1997, disagrees and believes the first amendment does not apply: “I don't think the First Amendment is implicit in this suit at all. These people are in the shabby business of selling work to others with the intention of obtaining grades and academic credit” (qtd. in Austin and Brown 23). As a result because online paper mills are dealing in fraud the First Amendment would not protect them from criminal charges (Austin and Brown 23).

Whether or not online paper mills are dealing in fraud or free speech, the hindering of Internet plagiarism by fighting paper mills does not stop students from plagiarizing from legitimate web content. As a result, educators have begun to look elsewhere for other ways to stop cyber- plagiarism. Ironically enough, this search has led back to the Internet.

Plagiarism Detection

At the University of Virginia in 2000, 122 students from an introductory physics course were accused of cheating on their term papers by plagiarizing work from the Internet (Roach). These 122 students were caught only because of the application of a computer program (Roach). Set up by the student's professor, this program and other programs like it are able to match strings of text from students' papers to similar text in potential source works (Decoo 44). Programs like these can be found as part of online anti-plagiarism services that many major universities and high schools are now subscribing to (Hafner 3).

Some of these services are free while others can charge upwards of $20 per year for a class of 30 students (Dyrli 2). How these anti- plagiarism searches work depends on the quality of the service. A free service most likely would just institute a search by looking for “long common strings in documents available on the Internet”( Decoo 44). These free services also do not take into account any language alterations the plagiarist may have made, resulting in only finding plagiarized work if the cheater had plagiarized word for word from the Internet source (Decoo 44). More powerful services compile their own databases of source material and use more specific search criteria ( Decoo 44). An example of one these services is turnitin.com.

Turnitin.com boasts 20,000 registered clients and provides services to many major universities such as Georgetown, Duke, Villanova, West Point, as well as international universities and high schools (Bartlett 2). For prices ranging from $1000 for high schools, to $2000 for colleges, educators are allowed an unlimited number of paper submissions to turnitin.com (Hafner 3). Some professors make it a mandatory requirement for all students to turn in a digital copy of their report to an account on turnitin.com (Bartlett 2), which then checks students' papers against millions of Internet sites, a database of previous selections, and papers from online paper mills (Hafner 3). If any portion of a paper compares favorably to another source, the portion is color coded and matched with a source web address (Bartlett 2). Ultimately it is then left up to the educator to decide if the evidence warrants accusations of plagiarism (Bartlett 3). Turnitin.com founder, Dr. John M. Barrie, estimates that of the work submitted to tunitin.com “nearly one-third is copied in whole or in part from another source” (Hafner 3).

Despite such a success rate it is likely that many papers turned into services like turnitin.com go unnoticed by the system and facilitates the belief in the student who plagiarized that they can do it again. Only with 24-hour surveillance on a student could an educator really determine if students were doing the work themselves or just pointing and clicking. While students have been using the Internet to aid in their search for potential work to plagiarize, the technology behind Internet searching has been advancing right along side. This technology has reached the point where it can now serve as a means to catch would be plagiarists as well. But perhaps a better approach to hindering plagiarism could be had by stopping it before it starts.

Conclusion

Advancements in digital technology and the growth of Internet access in classrooms across the World have started a new age of information processing. The ease of accessing a diverse amount of information from digital sources has had the positive effect of easing the way writers can support or broaden their own thoughts, but it also allowed the written thoughts of a writer to more easily mirror the exact words of their source material. Plagiarism can occur because of both societal and technological change. From Lessig we have seen that culture does embrace the building of new ideas upon old ones. But to some extent this may have also influenced plagiarism as a more socially acceptable practice by those who cannot recognize creativity from stealing. This partly can be due to how information is viewed in today's cut and paste world.

The developments of communication technology, from writing to the Internet, have alienated readers from the creative process a writer has gone through to create an original piece. Today information is what Levy calls “abstract, disembodied, and infinitely manipulable”, where writings have become only “information delivery vehicles” (57). Plagiarism is then able thrive in an environment where readers cannot see the driver's of these vehicles. Technology has allowed us to build digital traps like turnitin.com to catch plagiarists, but to hinder plagiarizing, society may have to resort back to old-fashioned morals to make sure the driver's of Levy's information vehicles are clearly seen. It was a king who eventually came to settle the feud between Finnian and

Colmcille over the plagiarized manuscript. The king ruled that the author's claim to ownership must be recognized (Logue 1). This can still hold true. By reminding students of their rights toward their own intellectual properties, an appreciation may build toward the works of others. By doing so, student's integrity toward using the work's of others to only strengthen and support their own ideas will hopefully remain intact, despite whatever new technologies may further the gap between writer and reader.

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