• Students throughout the country are blatantly stealing my deathless prose for their reports, garnering grades much higher than they normally receive, and thus bringing my site to the attention of the authorities;



• Someone has discovered that many of my posts are lifted word-for-word from the weblog of former British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock;



• The folks at Conde Nast and NYREV have belatedly discovered that 97.83% of the material on unfutz is lifted wholesale from The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and that, in fact, "Ed Fitzgerald" is actually nothing more than a mildly complex artificial intelligence program designed edit together those excerpts with enough "new" material (created from bits and pieces of liberal and progressive propaganda collected together through the years by the programmer, Victor Hedwick) to fool copyright lawyers into not ceasing-and-desisting on a daily basis.

Seriously, the Turn It In website, by a company called iParadigms, LLC, appears to be dedicated to preventing plagiarism [PDF] from the Internet by high school and college students. (I guess the honor system isn't sufficient any more.)

Turnitin’s unique plagiarism prevention system makes it easy to determine if students are writing original work. For every paper submitted to Turnitin, we generate two versions of a unique, customized Originality Report. ... Each report details the results of our comprehensive Internet, commercial database, and submitted student paper database searches in a concise and unambiguous format.

Our system is the most widely used, user-friendly, and technologically sophisticated plagiarism prevention tool available. It confirms instances of suspected plagiarism, and more importantly, acts as a powerful deterrent to stop cheating before it starts.

I'm going to have to ponder this a little, but my initial reaction is that it seems a little like overkill. I'm suspicious of the self-serving statistics that the company provides to support its case -- "80% of college-bound students admit to cheating on schoolwork, yet 95% of them never get caught" (more here) -- and wonder if the "plagiarism plague", isn't a bit overstated, yet another aspect of the cultural over-reaction which brought us such inanities as school "Zero Tolerance" policies where students are expelled for minor, inconsequential or inadvertant infractions.

I surely hope that no one ever analyzes unfutz for its "Originality" quotient. Even looking past the long excerpts from articles that sometimes stretch "fair use" to the limit (perhaps -- any lawyers out there like to comment?), you've got the ideas lifted wholesale from other weblogs, and those that I've adopted wholesle over the years and have no memory of where they came from. I like to credit all my sources whenever I can, typical, I think , of blogging's "transparency", but there's a lot I just don't remember where I originally came across it, and precious little I can point to on unfutz that's, ultimately, completely original with me. That's just part of being integrated into my culture, in spite of the painful ways in which my culture has disappointed me.