INFO 202 Fall 08 Blog

My brother works for an Oakland based software company called iParadigms, which does plagiarism detection. According to their website, they use “document source analysis,” which uses computer algorithms to create “fingerprints” of documents and then compares them against each other. It’s really effective and is in use by many universities as well as in publishing and legal companies. I’m not sure how their technology compares to latent semantic analysis that we talked about yesterday, but I just wanted to point out that plagiarism is a big problem, and the success of this company demonstrates the usefulness and relevance of  plagiarism detection. The company continues to do well even during the economic downturn, as more people are choosing to go back to school, which can only mean that there will be continued need for plagiarism detection services.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200810/bread

On the topic of authorship, royalties and intellectual property, I found an article discussing the predicament a baker or cook faces when their recipes are reproduced, unacknowledged (or sort of acknowledged), proliferated and popularized.  Regardless of whether the creation (eg. The grilled pizza) becomes accredited to a certain person or not, they certainly do not obtain commission or royalties when the item is placed on the menus of various dining establishments or on websites. 

In the instance of baking, when a quarter teaspoon measurement of a single ingredient can mean the difference between a perfectly brown crust and a dull yellow doughy hue, the baker who perfected the recipe may feel entitled to ownership rights.  I guess what I’m having difficulty wrapping my head around is the notion that a pasta recipe with a twist can have the same weight of copyrights as for example a novel or a textbook.  It’s hard for me to place recipes and the next new technological innovation within the same intellectual property realm.  In addition, the nature of artisanal craftsmanship, under which I think baking and olive oil making etc. falls, seems to value the hand-me-down, generation-after-generation-of-toiling-to-perfect-the-craft element that seems to make it impossible to pinpoint ownership.  

Shrug, who knows…