Plagiarism is something that's become a mainstay on the Internet. Why do your own work when you can just lift it from somewhere else? Nobody's going to find out. That is, until they do. Gamewise, called "the IMDb of video games" by Huffington Post, has been getting slammed over at the Giant Bomb forums. Why? Turns out that a rather suspicious number of Gamewise articles, images, and other tidbits appear to have been lifted straight from Giant Bomb. Oops.

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Today in DMCA Being A Great Idea That Is Working Really Well news, the journal-monitoring blog Retraction Watch had 10 of its posts taken down by it's service provider, WordPress, after being on the receiving end of a meritless DMCA claim from a site that stole their content -- and then had the massive stones to claim the copyright on it, demanding that WordPress remove the offending -- and oh yeah, original -- posts from Retraction Watch. Because the DMCA is working just the way it's meant to, is why.

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Scientific papers being retracted after publication isn't some kind of new phenomenon. The age of press releases might have made such snafus a more widely-known event, but it's one of those things that happens from time to time. Common wisdom was that the majority of retractions were due to errors present in the work, but a new study has concluded that it's actually misconduct like fraud or plagiarism that causes most retractions. In other words, scientists aren't dumb; they're just liars.

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In what surely ranks highly on the list of Scandals Discovered Because of Grammatical Errors, Harvard's most recent academic witch hunt was kicked off in part because one professor noticed an unusual typo in the same place in two exams. The discovery, made by assistant professor Matthew Platt, initially placed 13 final exams under suspicion this past spring. When Harvard publicly announced the inquiry at the end of August, the number of undergraduates being investigated had increased to about 125.

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Comic creator Jazan Wild claims that many elements from the fourth season of Heroes were plagiarized directly from him comic Carnival of Souls, and is suing for $60 million. Robot 6 summarizes the evidence presented by the plaintiff in the lawsuit between Wild and NBC.

"The settings and the storylines are virtually the same," the complaint states. "The main character in both stories leads a carnival of lost souls and outcasts. This dark character seeks to make his carnival more powerful by recruiting new members with special abilities. The appearance of some of the characters is also virtually identical to those in the plaintiff's books. [...] Even the dialogue is similar. Indeed, some of the scenes in Heroes appear as if plaintiff's books were used as storyboards by the defendants."

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Yo, dawg, we heard you like plagiarism. Well, this anti-plagiarism bill plagiarizes three paragraphs from the Wikipedia article on plagiarism, so you can... Eh, you know the rest. Argentinian statesman Gerónimo Vargas Aignasse suggested a change to article 172 of the of the Criminal Code, (Google Translate here), which would make plagiarism an offense punishable by jail time of three to eight years, and in his five paragraph summary description of the bill, copy-pasted three paragraphs from the Spanish language Wikipedia. In fact, only the first and last sentences are original. He even seems to have left in some of Wikipedia's hyperlinking punctuation by mistake.

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