I have an acqaintance who teaches journalism at a local university which I will not name here. He was telling me yesterday about the problems he's been having with plagiarism among his students. He caught one student this semester. He said her writing quality improved overnight. So he looked up her paper on Google and found it right away. He made up a full presentation showing the original paper and the student's paper with all the copied sections highlighted in yellow and presented this to the school's "honor court", which is, btw, made up mostly of students (and, as it turns out, some admitted plagiarizers). The "court" deliberated for over 90 minutes before returning a unanimous verdict IN FAVOR OF THE STUDENT.

He was pretty upset by this so he called a faculty meeting , or presented it as an agenda item on the next sceduled meeting--not quite sure on this. When he told the faculty that he had "Googled" the student, none of them had the foggiest idea what he was talking about. This means the faculty are pretty well ignorant of how students cheat these days.

When he finished telling me this, I said, "you know, you could contact the original copyright holed of the copied paper." He paused for a moment, then said, "that's a great idea." I doubt much would come of this action, and he doubted as well. But as I mulled it over, it occurred to me that if a really aggressive lawyer got inolved, he might just sue the school for countenancing copyright infringement, which strikes me as quite humorous. I love getting people into trouble :)