What is plagiarism?

PUBLICATION SCENARIO

PUBLISHERS AND PLAGIARISM

PUBLISHERS WANT FAT GUARANTEED RETURNS. New writers are ready to accept lower royalties

Now, the question is, why do the publishers encourage plagiarism? Why should the writers trod a stale and worn-out path and expose themselves to law suits?

The charges/disputes involving plagiarism are rising. Thousands of subjects/themes/topics remain uncovered/unwritten. Development of new technologies, travel and internet access to new countries have open up new avenues both in FICTION and NON-FICTION. They are waiting like brides for suitable bride grooms (or vice versa). Will the writers free themselves from bondage of the publishers?

A writer, has a few days back, received an offer from an IT Company, asking him to participate in a test.

They have made a very pleasant promise: There will be no shortage of work.

They have asked the aspirant writer to study the source material sent by them carefully, rewrite it and upload it back. There are numerous clauses and covenants warning the writer of the dangers of plagiarism.

They have also sent sample writes-up, examples of bad editing, examples of plagiarism, examples of good edititing etc.

The whole exercise smacked of that Company's probable hidden object: Their goal is search-engine optimisation (S.E.O.) for the websites of their clients.

Their client wanted to create some dozens or hundreds of website which should contain the same matter, but should be capable of not being caught by the anti-plagiarism programmes used by the Search engines for filtering the copycats. The business content-writer's work has become something like the work of an aircraft designer who is asked to create a stealth aircraft which will not be caught on radars and which is silent, like the recent helicopters used by the American soldiers for landing on the mansion of Osama Bin Laden.

Just as the fighter-planes and choppers have to in due course yield to the 'drones' on the war-field, probably the human content-writers have to someday yield to automatic website content generators.

Then, what for all these gyrations and hullabaloo about plagiarism?