Netting plagiarists

The roots of the word plagiarism lie in the Latin noun "plaga" used to describe a net employed by kidnappers to steal children.

Today plagiarists use an electronic version of a plaga, netting others prose with the cut and paste functions on their word processors.

But now those trying to snare wordnappers in the newsroom, classroom and the scholarly academy are equipped with an electronic net of their own.

Battleships rely on shakedown cruises, inaugural voyages designed to uncover mechanical and other problems that only come to light when the ship is at seaa. Programmers do the same, releasing beta versions of software intended to root out bugs and glitches, and often engaging users to help them in the search.

Check out "Plagiarism 2.0," by Gadi Dechter in The Baltimore City Paper to learn about illuminating shakedown cruises of Lexis-Nexis CopyGuard to detect plagiarism, in this case commited by ousted columnist Michael Olesker, and then by the City Paper.

Journalists normally recoil at any assault on their First Amendment rights, fearing a "chilling effect" that may hinder their work to inform the citizenry.

But CopyGuard may produce a similar effect, given its ability to to compare allegedly purloined prose with, as Dechter describes it, "more than 6.1 billion documents in LexisNexis and web databases, and then identifies any matching phrases and their respective sources."

Anything that might slow a writer's decision to plagiarize or to be less careful about habits that make it happen is one may be chilling effect that is a positive development for writers, like Olesker and other plagiarists, whose fact fate is often the corporate equivalent of the death penalty.

There may be another chilling effect: LexisNexis won't say how much it costs, which I assume means it's pricey and may be out of reach for budget-stretched newsrooms.