Don't Blame the Internet for Plagiarism

By Morris Freedman

Great innovations inevitably produce unexpected consequences, which may be good, bad, mixed, or indifferent. The telephone gave us taping, which allows us to get messages while away from a phone, and tapping, which allows others to hear our private conversations. For all its glorious contributions to civilization, the printing press also enabled the spread of plagiarism, the claiming of another's creation as one's own.

The Internet, today's wonderful technological advance, has vastly expanded the pestilence of plagiarism, virtually inviting every unscrupulous, lazy, naive, dull-witted, or simply desperate student with access to a computer and a modem, from middle school through graduate school, to plagiarize. Of course, plagiarism doesn't need new technology to attract practitioners, but it is easier to download papers than to steal from old-fashioned sources like Cliffs and Monarch Notes or the encyclopedia.

The Internet offers writing on all sorts of subjects for nominal fees, often even for nothing, the sponsor selling advertising space on his Web site. A search can summon up more than 50 sources for papers that students can copy and present as their own, according to a New York Times report. Of course, like any library, the Internet also makes available a vast supply of materials from books, magazines, newspapers, government reports, and reference sources that the most modestly enterprising student can copy, adapt, and...