The discussion of "Plagiarism" is of course, the debate around Napster brought home to us academics. Need I say to Internet researchers that the Internet combined with digital technologies brought about the capacity for the more or less effortless, costless, (and with more or less perfect verisimilitude), reproduction and universal distribution of information encoded as data--texts being no less subject to such opportunities as is music or video or any other digitally encodable information form. But this is mechanics, and unfortunately most of the discussion concerning "plagiarism" in academia in general (and on this list) seems to be on the level of mechnanics. However, doesn't all this discussion about various mechanical ways of capturing the plargiarizing miscreants say some interesting things about the state of academe where: * student assessment is so ritualized and depersonalized that digitally encoded performances (e.g. student essays/reports) can be substituted one for the other (apparently seamlessly) subject only to mechanical (policing) review * essay topics are of such timelessness that they allow for such subtitution/insertion across time and space * assessments are of student presentation/re-presentation of infinitely reproducible (and in a digital age) completely depersonalized "information" rather than the rather more context (and individual) specific "knowledge". Surely what is important is that students can construct a useful argument, judiciously select and cogently deploy information from the infinite information warehouse on the Net (or elsewhere) rather than find this or that clever way of restating (in their own words) whatever is the content of the subject they are discussing. I teach something called "Knowledge Management" to graduate IS and Management students and among the tenets of KM is that knowledge is collaborative, it grows with use, and that it derives much of its meaning/value from its context. Personally (and here I am speaking completely for myself and not for my Faculty or University), I am less concerned with "plagiarism", understood as the simple reproduction of the words of others than I am with how well these words fit within the context of the matter (essay, exercise, etc.) under review and whether there is an implicit or explicit claim that the words are those of the author e.g. whether there is a referencing of included text. My assumption is that given the availability of Google and the Net, the inclusion of the text of others (where suitably referenced) is not only inevitable, but desireable--not much that students can usefully say about a lot of topics without it. In fact, I see a direct link between the caliber of responses from those students who understand how to use the Net/Google effectively to accumulate their information and construct their answer as knowledge, as compared to those students who don't make such use. In the medium or longer term there would appear to be no technical means for controlling the infinite reproduction and distribution of digitally encoded music and image (read video) at least this side of a more or less total breakdown of the Net/personal computing as we currently know it (see the discussion around Hollywood's Internet anti-piracy proposals and the TechLords responses re: the Hollings bill); so I see no way of controlling "plagiarism" even in the short run, short of devoting vast resources of time, money and energy to this unproductive end and turning us all into Junior detectives/policemen in the process. Just as for the "Napster" issues IMHO the time and resources spent on chasing plagiarists (read Napster/Freenet/Morpheus etc.etc. pirates) would be better spent figuring out how this new medium changes the nature of the messages it is carrying and their larger cultural/institutional contexts and adapting our teaching activities and approaches (and business models) to these new opportunities. Mike Gurstein