Many Plagiarism Detection services can compare any submitted text with a large library (mostly, the WWW) and decide if there is enough similarity with a certain source. They usually do not disclose their algorithm, but assure “it comprises proprietary technology” and “detects digital signature of the authors”. A leader in this field says "Copyscape looks for pages containing sizeable chunks of identical text". Nobody knows how that translates into numbers.

Goog and the other search engines are against "duplicated content", but they do not define it.

The availability of "text de-authoring tools" makes the intellectual property issue very blurry to any attorney willing to evaluate the existence of a crime. And as a collateral effect, the modified text will not be detected by the anti-plagiarism tools, which mostly search for exact text coincidences.

I started to examine some Plagiarism Detection sites, and I noticed that the better ones require some kind of a fee. Of course, it is not easy to compare a student term paper with the whole Library of Congress and the whole Web, plus the old Web Archives in the Wayback Machine. Others like Ferret are free and let you compare your file with another, but you need to provide BOTH files.

So, without hiding my condition of SEO Tool maker, I declare the need for a public algorithm that will establish if a text is the un-ethical or immoral or illegal derivative of a web source. It is necessary either for nailing plagiarists or to help writers and webmasters to define the limits for near-plagiarism and near-plagiarism devices.

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