Technology

National | Cracking down on plagiarism, one arcade game that continues to thrive, and more | Chris Stamper

MATCH GAME

Cheating is as easy as cutting and pasting these days, but a new plagiarism-detection software package purports to check suspicious text against billions of documents in seconds. A technology that started as a buffer for college honor codes is now spreading to business use.

About 2,500 high schools and colleges in the United States use a copy detector called Turnitin, created by Oakland-based iParadigms. This year, the company introduced a commercial version of its software called iThenticate.

Business users pay a premium price for security: $1,000 a year and $10 for each page submitted for screening. Yet that may be cheap insurance against embarrassing publicity or a copyright-infringement suit.

Turnitin and iThenticate work like the virus scanners on PCs. They take a digital fingerprint of the text being scrutinized and run it against a huge database, looking for a match. Their new nonacademic clients include newspapers, police, and companies that produce technical manuals.

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April 24, 2004, Vol. 19, No. 16

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