and having taught EFL / in Asia, I ought to have a much higher tolerance for plagiarism,
but I'm starting to think that there should be severe legal punishments for publishing anything on one web page that came from another.
There's just too many pages stealing other pages and making a mockery of the informative value of any given search; and all the while the U.S. government is trying to pretend like they care so much about intellectual property; but what if it's not one of their lobbyists?
To qualify, we as individuals would still like to be able to promote the art and information that we find valuable, by posting other's songs, pictures, and writing (hopefully with appropriate references). Thus, this kind of law should specifically apply to sites accompanied by any form of profitable advertising. A sort of non-profit exemption is already explicitly admitted in the FBI warnings one sees at the beginning of rental movies, but has apparently come under fire, as entertainment moguls panic about file-sharing. However, legally, promoting information/art should be distinguished from profiting from plagiarism.
(for instance, check out the new HuaiSu link, which I have purposely reposted in the interests of upgrading its availability.)
I mean I'm all for free information, but I'm so sick of running into more and more duplicates (say, about.com for instance), just embedded in different advertisments, when even the first 100 hits of my search give me basically the exact same info, none of it exactly what I wanted, nor barely more than some superficial 'help' page, "it's so easy, just click on the icon", which if i'd seen, i wouldn't be here.
This topic is also related to an issue of dating which severly threatens the viable use of the internet, but is independent enough to procrastinate, if not postpone.
(or, we need not only adapting personalized searches with chronological evaluation , but also page dis-similarity evaluation, where the ads don't count!
who knows, maybe google's algorithm already does do all that, but it doesn't look like it, and their promotion of PageRank, stressing "links to"-counts, seems more like a "popularity" measure, inducing the kinds of frightening feedback loops that we often see in fashion trends, rather than providing any kind of useful information evaluation.)