Friday, February 4, 2011

Student Plagiarist Ordered to Pay $15,000 for Copyright Infringement

Last summer I wrote a couple blog posts about a graduate of The Ohio State University whose PhD was revoked after the discovery of plagiarism in her dissertation. (Click here to read the first blog and click here to go to second one). In addition to being asked to give her diploma back, she was sued for copyright infringement by the author whose work she stole. The lawsuit was settled, and last December, a judge ordered the plagiarist to pay $15,000 to the plaintiff.

The case is Montana C. Miller v. Elisabeth Nixon, Case No. : 2:10-cv-0759 In the United States District Court Southern District of Ohio Eastern Division.

It will be interesting to see if any copyright infringement lawsuits are filed against OU graduates. I wonder if OU personnel could be named as defendants since many professors have pronounced their belief that copying in the introduction or literature review is no big deal.

The following was added on Feb 6, 2011:

Yesterday, the Columbus Dispatch published an article about the lawsuit.

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2011/02/05/degree-revoked-plagiarist-will-pay-to-settle-lawsuit.html?sid=101

6 comments:

Hannah Sparling said...

Hi Tom,
My name is Hannah Sparling. I'm a reporter for The BG News (the student newspaper at Bowling Green State University), and I'm working on a story involving this case right now. I was wondering if you would be willing to talk with me, give me your opinions on this case and also on plagiarism in general at colleges and universities. If you could email me at hksparl@bgsu.edu and let me know, that would be great. Thank you.

Anonymous said...

How about this from Ohio State?

http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/ohjdpr22&div=28&id=&page=

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Sandy said...

It will be interesting to see if any copyright infringement lawsuits are filed against OU dissertation graduates.

dissertation online

Barbara Atkinson said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Barbara Atkinson said...

Students are too lazy to write themselves and they have found an alternative. So plagiarism text is very common nowadays.There are a lot of sites that help protect your blog from content theft. I want to recommend you a very helpful site with a lot of great tools for students - Contrib.