Plagiarism litigation trends in the USA and Australia

In this article we explore the increasing complexity of plagiarism litigation in the USA and Australia. Plagiarism has always been a serious academic issue and academic staff and students have wrestled with its definition and appropriate penalties for some time. However, the advent of the Internet and more freely accessible information resources, along with busy lives and pressures to succeed, may be leading to more frequent incidents of plagiarism. Alternatively, the same information resources and software packages may mean that we are now more able to identify when plagiarism occurs. The following discussion explores not just the traditional issues that have arisen with respect to plagiarism, but also the extended contexts in which plagiarism discussion is taking place in courtrooms, not university staffrooms. We consider issues in common in the two nations, as well as the wider academic community, and distinctive areas of litigation that have arisen in the USA and Australia.