Market Fragmentation
In a fragmented market with a myriad of mutually
exclusive market niches, consumer preferences and
marketing and sales channels - economies of scale in
manufacturing and distribution are meaningless.
Narrowcasting replaces broadcasting, mass customization
replaces mass production, a network of shifting
affiliations replaces the rigid owned-branch system. The
decentralized, intrapreneurship-based corporation is a late
response to these trends. The mega-corporation of the
future is more likely to act as a collective of start-ups than
as a homogeneous, uniform (and, to conspiracy theorists,
sinister) juggernaut it once was.
XXXIV. The Kidnapping of Content
http://www.plagiarism.org and http://www.Turnitin.com
Latin kidnapped the word "plagion" from ancient Greek
and it ended up in English as "plagiarism". It literally
means "to kidnap" - most commonly, to misappropriate
content and wrongly attribute it to oneself. It is a close kin
of piracy. But while the software or content pirate does
not bother to hide or alter the identity of the content's
creator or the software's author - the plagiarist does.
Plagiarism is, therefore, more pernicious than piracy.
Enter Turnit.com. An off-shoot of www.iparadigms.com,
it was established by a group of concerned (and
commercially minded) scientists from UC Berkeley.
Whereas digital rights and asset management systems are
geared to prevent piracy - plagiarism.org and its
commercial arm, Turnit.com, are the cyber equivalent of a
law enforcement agency, acting after the fact to discover
the culprits and uncover their misdeeds. This, they claim,
is a first stage on the way to a plagiarism-free Internet-
based academic community of both teachers and students,
in which the educational potential of the Internet can be
fully realized.
The problem is especially severe in academia. Various
surveys have discovered that a staggering 80%(!) of US
students cheat and that at least 30% plagiarize written
material. The Internet only exacerbated this problem.
More than 200 cheat-sites have sprung up, with thousands
of papers available on-line and tens of thousands of
satisfied plagiarists the world over. Some of these hubs -
like cheater.com, cheatweb or cheathouse.com - make no
bones about their offerings. Many of them are located
outside the USA (in Germany, or Asia) and at least one
offers papers in a few languages, Hebrew included.
The problem, though, is not limited to the ivory towers. E-
zines plagiarize. The print media plagiarize. Individual
journalists plagiarize, many with abandon. Even
advertising agencies and financial institutions plagiarize.
The amount of material out there is so overwhelming that
the plagiarist develops a (fairly justified) sense of
immunity. The temptation is irresistible, the rewards big
and the pressures of modern life great.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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