DISQUS

Plagiarism is growing at an exponential rate due to the boom in the demand for content. The Internet landscape is being flooded with low level writers who, usually on purpose, simply take what they need to fill up the article.

The end result is plagiarism, global and/or incremental.

Odds are, your work will be stolen in whole or part at some point. Most of the low level writers lack a proper education, especially on the subject of writing, and therefore only know what global plagiarism is. As a result, they take a little here and a little there.

Here is the problem with all those numbers.

Let's say someone steals a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS2. Adobe will say that they lost $650 in revenue as a result. They will then estimate how many copies where stolen and multiply that number by $650 and do so on all products to get a final loss amount.

However, who is to say that the person who stole a copy of Photoshop would have purchased it if the option to get it for free was not there? I would think it could be proved that many people who take high priced software would not buy it even if that was the only option.

So all of these reports are seriously flawed.

As to the job claim, that's just marketing. If the company says they lost $X in revenue due to piracy, only the shareholders care. However, if they say it costs jobs, now they have personalized it for the public. In other words, it's just spin.