By the time i finish writing this, 2,487 students across premier institutes of India have prepared a report/assignment by merely copying information off the net. I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the statistics, but i can certainly vouch for the phenomenon. And so can thousands of students worldwide. This has become a serious issue. Colleges and now even companies have started giving it a serious thought. But then why do students, or for that matter anyone else, do so? Well I’m no expert on this topic, but going by my experience I believe its due to the pressure to perform and also due to the “i don’t wanna do hardwork” attitude. Many term it smart work -do what you can’t find on the net.
Recently Yahoo came into news, because a third party content provider for its Malayalam website had simply copy pasted information (a recipe to be precise) from a malyali blog without even giving any credit to the author. Yahoo had to withdraw the article, but only after causing enough public outrage (only in blogosphere).
Writing afresh is not that difficult a task. Its just that some thinking and hard work goes into it. Lets not indulge into adamant copy paste, lets go for Ctrl+N instead.
