The race is on. But, what worries me about this is that, eventually, the plagiarism detection software will be — and possibly should be — useless, for all the false positives it’s likely to throw.
There are a few very good reasons that, under copyright law, only the holder of the copyright is allowed to allege or sue for a violation. It’s one thing for us to report a possible violation as a concern, but this can quickly turn into a form of online harassment. And I once suspected plagiarism by a poet who had published her own poems with very minor revisions on multiple sites under several pen names. I was able to verify that all were hers, and she thanked me for my concern — fortunately, I did not accuse her of anything, and she satisfied my protective concern by answering my questions, sent by me to one “persona” and email address, through a different pseudonym and email address that I’d thought was plagiarizing her.
I’d want to be alerted, but I would not want to deal with accusations. If you notice what I wrote at the bottom of each piece, it might be a risk — even with the same names on both accounts, someone might accuse one of being an imposter account, as those are numerous as flies on dung, online.
This is something worth considering, before writing yet-another-bland-listicle that follows some tried-and-true formula for earning money on the web (or, more accurately, the author has been led to believe will earn money on the web — as it may have for the first author to write it). Even if it’s not plagiarized, the formula — applied to a heavily written-about topic — may lead to assumptions of plagiarism, or of a complete lack of originality at the very least.
