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Indiana University Plagiarism

 
Update 13 Feb 2007: The copied content has been removed.

I'm no stranger to plagiarism. Plenty of the articles on this site have been lifted and reproduced elsewhere. There's not much I can do about it. Usually a quick email to the perpetrator solves the problem. No sense getting worked up about it - it takes a little of my time once in a while to stay on top of it.

Sometimes, though, one of these incidents just surprises me. Recently, with the help of the brilliant Copyscape, I tracked down a copy of my article on the robots.txt file.

The shock? It was ripped off by a University! Indiana University, to be precise - here's "their" robots.txt guide. As with most copies, the person responsible has endeavoured to hide the copy by slightly reworking the content. Copyscape provide a page highlighting the matching passages from the two documents, which shows more or less exactly what was copied and how the duplicate was put together.

Content on this site is released under a Creative Commons License, which allows people to reproduce and build on content here. The conditions of that are that due credit must be given and derivative works must be similarly licensed. Given that the university has failed to give credit, their use is clearly not covered by this license.

I'm surprised that the university couldn't find the time (or maybe they couldn't find a person) to put an article on something simple like the robots exclusion standard by themselves. I can only hope the rest of the content they have in the same area of the site is their own.
 

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This is the second example I've seen recently where Creative Commons licenses have been clearly breached. What can you do? I don't know of anyone who has used CC to actually protect their content as yet...

I hope at least you have named and shamed the department to the university!
Hi George. I don't really know what you can do in this situation. You can go the lawyer route. The DMCA applies and a notice could be sent to the university's host demanding the site be taken down. Seems a little inappropriate to me though - rather an overreaction.

The public shaming will do just fine, and hopefully as a result they'll remove the content.

I sent an email but had no response, hence the post.
A colleague of mine had a similar problem with a different University. He emailed with no response, so he finally phoned them. They faxed him a simple form asking for the source material, author, etc and the URL of the plagiarized content. He faxed it back and within 72 hours the content was removed.
Hoosier daddy!

 

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