The End of Plagiarism

Well, not really, but this article in the New York Times gives a good summary of how the digitization, linking, and searching of books might change the production and consumption of knowledge in the future. Key quote:

"Once a book has been integrated into the new expanded library by means of this linking, its text will no longer be separate from the text in other books. For instance, today a serious nonfiction book will usually have a bibliography and some kind of footnotes. When books are deeply linked, you'll be able to click on the title in any bibliography or any footnote and find the actual book referred to in the footnote. The books referenced in that book's bibliography will themselves be available, and so you can hop through the library in the same way we hop through Web links, traveling from footnote to footnote to footnote until you reach the bottom of things."

My thought on this is that plagiarism will be very easy to measure and quantify once all books are linked and searchable. I only hope that every poorly researched paper I ever wrote in high school has been erased from my family's old computers. Could you imagine how easy it would be for the plagiarism bot to figure out whether my paraphrasing was much closer to copying? On the other hand, I could also put my draft paper through a plagiarism detector to determine whether I had unwittingly "internalized" some source.

The one caveat to this future is that perpetually extended copyright protection may stop the digitization of books. If I were concerned solely about my reputation in the eyes of my former high school teachers, I'd say to hell with digitization, there's such a thing as too much transparency. But for the future of knowledge, let's hope the indexing continues apace.