As far as I know, plagiarism is not a crime in most countries, and this is probably because plagiarism is so difficult to define. How many words have been replaced and reorganized before release copied article ceases to be a copy of the original?
That is why plagiarism is much more difficult to deal with than copyright theft. A thief simply copyright steals your work, lock stock and barrel. A plagiarist steals your work and disguises it as their own.
But while plagiarism is not a crime, it is severely punished in professions which are based on the writing. I heard about a professor of sociology who has lost his job almost overnight because he plagiarized the work of someone else. You would also feel a great deal of shame being exposed as a plagiarist.
Unfortunately, Internet plagiarism is thriving. There is now an entire industry that provides students with “model” term papers for the purpose of plagiarism
This is how it works: the software is a ‘fingerprint’ of a document submitted using a sophisticated set of algorithms. The fingerprint is then checked against a database that contains more than 1 billion of public funds available Web pages. Plagiarism.org then produces an “originality” which gives the user an indication of how the original paper was presented, and if it falls above or below the threshold of plagiarism.