PRE-EMPTING PLAGIARISM

JKL Authoring is a service agency that supplies professional writing services to client companies, and provides in-house editing, documentation, ad copy, reports, resumes, press releases, and news item write-up services. JKL has recently been sued by one of their clients, accused of numerous instances of plagiarism, supported by Google searches on the Internet that return similar or identical text to that produced by one of JKL's most productive employees.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY
Google or Bing searches on unique word combinations are becoming a popular way to discover plagiarism. Unfortunately, not all written documents are available on the Internet - this is especially true of trade secrets, proprietary information, some types of technical writing, or text about subjects which are of low popular interest. And not all unique word combinations found in an original document that happen to also appear on the Internet are necessarily plagiarized. To do searches over the Internet on every unique phrase in every document a prolific writer produces would be cumbersome and labor-intensive at best, especially if others in the office are not familiar with the commonly used lexicon of a given industry or task.

THE VIEWSENDER SOLUTIONS
Any work plagiarized using a monitored computer will appear multiple times in viewSender's database of collected images and text - several times, of course, as the output document is being generated, but also several more times as the user visits and reviews the source document(s). viewSender is perfectly suited for detecting plagiarism and prevent it from being delivered to clients. A finished document can be submitted to a custom viewSender server application which can identify unique characteristics of the text and seek out all similar occurrences in the monitored user's captured text and images, in a workgroup's captured data, or across an entire organization on or before a given date or time.

The first time a unique phrase appears after the provided date (assuming the date precedes the start of the work on the output document) will be one of three things: the source of the plagiarized information, a reference which the author credits in his or her work, or the user's original work . Other occurrences of the unique text can also be requested (in the case where an author inadvertently copies something from memory and verifies it with the original source later).

The story of Jayson Blair, the plagiarizing journalist who once worked for the New York Times, is well known, and the application of viewSender technology to that kind of intellectual property theft is obvious.

However, there is a rapidly growing need for viewSender's plagiarism detection capabilities in an arena that may have much greater scale and risk. Most of the intellectual property created in the United States involves, in some form, computer programming. With the popularity of sites like CodeGuru.com, The Code Project, thousands of open-source projects, and hundreds of language-specific sample and help sites, the temptation (and financial justification) to copy another author's code into a proprietary project without strict attention to usage restrictions can be overwhelming (especially for young programmers wanting to be productive). There have recently been a number of high-profile infringement cases filed by and against large corporations based on code plagiarism; the costs for all involved are tremendous, both in monetary and non-monetary terms, and experts expect these issues to continue increasing well into the foreseeable future.

viewSender can help validate the source of claimed original matter, ensure the proper accreditation of quoted material, and detect plagiarism before it puts a company at risk.