As we reported last week, Zynga was accused of straight up stealing the ideas in Tiny Tower for their new game Dream Heights. Zynga CEO Mark Pincus wrote an internal memo defending their style of game development. That memo has …

Zynga, makers of fine Facebook and mobile games, makes a living by taking an established game idea and making it their own. This has led to accusations over the years that Zynga flat-out copies games from their competitors. Zynga’s new …

As I reported yesterday, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing is big business. Amazon is putting more money into the payout pool for the Kindle Owners Lending Library and many amateur authors are getting in on the action. But, as Fast Company …

Cindy McCain’s kitchen looked a lot like The Food Network’s to one eagle-eyed website visitor, who spotted lots of similarities between recipes published on both sites.

The unattributed verbatim appearance of a Wikipedia article in a book from a major publisher sparked accusations of plagiarism, and raises more serious issues of ethics as well as the perils of publishing under open licenses.

Advertisements for weapons, drugs, and prostitutes have been banned from Google.  All right, fair enough.  But now advertisements for essay-writing services will also be forbidden, and while more than a few people have raised their eyebrows, others have cheered.

Google Book Search prevents authors from going down in literary history as plagiarists by offering a searchable database of books.

Nothing is sacred on the internet, not the words you write and publish in your blog nor the pictures you take and upload to Flickr.

Unsurprisingly, The Boston Globe says that online plagiarism is rampant in the blog world.

If you want to learn what you can do to protect your rights to the original content you post on your blog…

The Consumerist points us to a story at The Huffington Post, where an AP journalist was caught plagiarizing a story posted by a blogger.

The brief article by editor Frank Bridgewater in the January 13 edition of the Honolulu Star Bulletin informs readers that entertainment reporter Tim Ryan has been dismissed for “phrases or sentences that appeared elsewhere before being included, un-attributed, in stories that ran in the Star-Bulletin.”

Coolhunter tells the story in Estonian how the biggest blogger in a small country, Kaur Kender, an accomplished writer, stopped blogging [via Mul on Savi].

Constantin Basturea writes that excerpts of postings from PR blogs are republished, with new permalinks, on a website with pages featuring Google ads and asks …

Plagiarism is derived from the Latin plagiarius (“kidnapper”), and refers to a kind of intellectual theft defined as “the false assumptions of authorship, the wrongful act of taking the product of another person’s mind, and presenting it as one’s own.” (Alexander Lindey, Plagiarism and Originality)