The internet makes plagiarism in the literary and academic worlds so much easier - but new technology is also helping to catch the increasing number of culprits, reports Aengus Collins.

Plagiarism is hardly a new phenomenon, but one might be forgiven for thinking that it's a vice whose time has come. The news has recently been awash with high-profile allegations of literary plagiarism, while the conclusion of the academic year has seen a ratcheting up of familiar concerns about plagiarism among third-level students.

And this week, a New York court is hearing allegations that rapper and actor Ludacris, and his fellow star Kanye West, stole the lyrics and beat of another song for their 2003 hit Stand Up. The duo are accused of taking from the group IOF's Straight Like That. The copyright case is expected to last a week.

Last month's unsuccessful case against The Da Vinci Code in the British High Court was always going to be headline news, but it was never really more than speculative. Two of the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail claimed that Dan Brown had built his book on the "architecture" of theirs. The judge disagreed, noting that even if central themes were common to both books, they were much too general to be protected by copyright law.

As novelist Julian Barnes pointed out to the Christian Science Monitor, literary creation depends on the kind of borrowing that Dan Brown was being brought to court for. "This is how a writer instinctively operates. It's just the same as if you've been told a story by a friend or something happens in your family. It's all fair game."

The same cannot be said for the techniques of 19-year-old Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan, who in the past two months has been accused of giving the lie quite spectacularly to TS Eliot's assertion that "immature poets borrow; mature poets steal". Within weeks of her first novel's publication in March, the book had been recalled amid allegations that numerous passages in it had been plagiarised from two books by US author Megan McCafferty.

Viswanathan apologised, saying that she must have "internalised" McCafferty's words, and claiming that any similarities between her work and McCafferty's were "completely unintentional and unconscious". The evidence raised more than a few eyebrows, and new allegations surfaced of further plagiarism in the book, with passages lifted from a range of authors, including Salman Rushdie and Sophie Kinsella. On May 2nd, Viswanathan's two-book deal was cancelled by her publisher, Little, Brown. It is hard not to feel a little sorry for Viswanathan, who has been left stranded in a deep hole of her own digging. The same cannot be said of William H Swanson, millionaire CEO of American defence giant Raytheon, and author of Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management.

Some 300,000 copies of Swanson's booklet had been distributed before a blogger in the US revealed that the rules enumerated in it looked suspiciously like ones contained in a 1944 book, The Unwritten Rules of Engineering by WJ King.

Swanson apologised for plagiarising King's book, but was less than contrite, deciding to add a new Rule No 34 to his list: "Regarding the truisms of human behaviour, there are no original rules." Which is much like a burglar offering the defence that property is theft.

Of course plagiarism is by no means all literary scandal and skulduggery. For academics it is part of the day-to-day drill of moulding the minds of the next generation and third-level plagiarism is believed to be on the rise. Anecdotal evidence abounds of fresh-faced students arriving at college unaware that there is anything wrong with copying and pasting great swathes of text from the internet directly into their essays. For some it becomes a long-term habit.

In 2004, Michael Gunn was excluded from the University of Kent at Canterbury on the eve of his final exams for serial plagiarism throughout the three years of his degree programme.

"I hold my hands up," he said at the time. "I did plagiarise. I never dreamt it was a problem." He threatened to sue the university for not setting him straight earlier. One hopes and trusts that Gunn is the exception rather than the rule. But there seems to be a general view that the problem is getting worse.

"I wouldn't say it's rampant," says Prof Paul Giller, registrar at University College Cork, "but there's certainly more evidence of plagiarism now. Access to electronic information has increased massively, and inevitably that means there are more opportunities for plagiarism."

Information technology has changed things in a number of ways. First, students have more material available to plagiarise. Second, plagiarism has become easier, just a matter of a few mouse-clicks. And third, it seems that technology has blurred the ethics for students.

Dr Fiona Duggan, head of advice and guidance at the Plagiarism Advisory Service in the UK, notes that students tend to value books and online material very differently. "They are quite aware that plagiarising material from a book is wrong," she says, "but are more likely to see material on the internet as a general resource that can be freely used without citation or attribution."

How widespread is plagiarism among third-level students? The data is limited. An Australian study in 2002 assessed 1,770 pieces of student work and found that almost 9 per cent comprised more than 25 per cent unattributed material taken from the internet. Two of the pieces contained more than 75 per cent unattributed material.

An article published last year in the Computer Journal outlined an investigation into plagiarism among first-year computing students at Dublin City University. Of 283 students taking a one-semester course in Java programming, the report said that 36 per cent plagiarised at least one of their 46 exercises from another classmate. According to the study most copied just one or two exercises; but one student copied 19.

There are two key pillars to the academics' efforts to stamp out plagiarism. The first is to educate students about it. That means having clear policies in place that set out exactly what plagiarism is. It also means providing ongoing teaching about research methods and academic writing. But this education about plagiarism is not only a matter for third-level institutions.

There's a keen sense among some academics that not enough work on information skills is being done in schools. "We need to see teachers instil in their pupils the understanding that you can't just copy and paste," says Prof Giller.

The second anti-plagiarism pillar is formed by systems of detection and deterrence, which go hand in hand - the more likely a student thinks it is that their plagiarism will be caught, the less likely they are to plagiarise.

All universities have a system of sanctions in place, most involving gradations depending on the severity of the plagiarism, from a reduced essay mark for a minor infringement to exclusion from a module or entire degree for more flagrant or persistent breaches.

The bulk of detection work still rests with academics, but an increasing number of universities are turning to software tools such as Turnitin. This cross-references a student's essay against a vast databank of academic journals, web pages and other students' work. It then generates a new version of the student's essay with colour-coded highlighting indicating which passages have been lifted from precisely which online sources.

Trinity College Dublin has pioneered the use of Turnitin in Ireland. "We try to treat the students as mature adults," says Dr Vincent Wade, director of the college's Centre for Academic Practice and Student Learning. "We teach them about plagiarism, we point out the traps to them. But we let them know that if they fall into the traps we will catch them. The technology helps with that."

Human nature being what it is, there will always be those who find a way to break the rules on plagiarism. It's easy to take to the moral high ground, but thereare probably many of us with a less-than-spotless conscience when it comes to respecting intellectual property rights.

Making a copy of an album for a friend or using a "borrowed" copy of a software package may differ in significant respects from plagiarism but, like plagiarism, it amounts to piggybacking on the intellectual property of others. According to the Business Software Alliance, 38 per cent of all software in use in Ireland is pirated. That's slightly higher than the proportion of students who plagiarised in the DCU study.