Defining plagiarism in literature and software code

¶ … Software

The objective of this study is to consider the issue of plagiarism in a book and to determine how many exactly same words results in drawing the line at plagiarism. This work will additionally consider how many lines of computer code need to be the same to judge that one piece of software is a plagiarized version of another.

The work entitled "Hollywood in India: Protecting Intellectual Property (B)" relates that the movie "My Name is Khan" is going to be released "In a way no Hindi film has been released internationally before…" (Iyer, 2011, p.1) Vijay Singh, CEO of Fox Star Studios is reported to have "taken considerable steps to protect 'My Name is Khan' from the dangers of piracy." (Iyer, 2011, p.1) The report states that in order to "Prevent theatrical print theft, each analog reel that was released in India and abroad was personally accompanied by Fox Star Personnel, Dina Dattani, Head of Legal and Business Affairs at Fox Star, said 'During the release of My Name is Khan, Fox Star had dedicated personnel for shipping prints in India and internegatives internationally." ( ) This is a process that was costly but is reported to have "signified a new approach by an Indian studio towards combating piracy.

I. Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a word that is "applied to vastly different situations, for crimes as well as misdemeanors and even for deed of unclear wrongness 'from sloppy documentation and proof-reading to outright, premeditated fraud." (Bouville, 2008) When plagiarism is explicitly defined at all, it is "generally taken to mean the appropriation of the words and ideas of others. However, the specific status of words and ideas is not always made clear." (Bouville, 2008) Bouville (2008) states that plagiarism "…has been equated with strings of two -- three, four], or seven consecutive words that are found in two different articles." The work of Hexham states "Academic plagiarism occurs when a writer repeatedly uses more than four words from a printed source without the use of quotation marks and a precise reference to the original source." (1992) According to Bouville (2008) there is no "rationale…given for choosing this particular number (or why plagiarism can be defined as strings of words of a certain length in the first place)." Reported as even "less straightforward" is the establishment of "plagiarism of ideas." (Bouville, 2008)

III. Plagiarism in Software

Source-code plagiarism is an issue that has been addressed in research studies. The work of Cosma and Joy (2006) entitled "Source-code plagiarism: A UK academic perspective" states that there "…appears to be no commonly agreed description on what constitutes source-code plagiarism from the perspective of academics who teach programming on computer courses. There was a general agreement between academics that students should acknowledge parts of the source-code that were not originally authored by them, although some academics have expressed uncertainties whether reuse without acknowledgement constitutes plagiarism." (Cosma and Joy, 2006)

Summary and Conclusion

Plagiarism can be taken to mean the use of someone's words or ideas without acknowledging the author. This is true in the case of movie or film plagiarism, plagiarism in books and even plagiarism in software coding.