The Plagiarius Awards 2008

The 2008 Awards for plagiarism of product designs have been awarded!

First place is for a salt and pepper shaker set, second place goes to a vegetable slicer (even the package is plagiarized!) and third place was awarded to something useful in heating elements (never seen one myself before, but that is beside the point).

Two special awards were given to a watch fabricator and to a "serial criminal" who has copied an entire series of technical toys.

Eight other products were given a dishonorable mention. They are on exhibition at the Plagiarism Museum in Solingen, Germany. The awards have been given yearly since 2004, and there is apparently no dearth of candidates.

Docoloc

A German professor, Martin Gutbrod, wrote a little software system called "Docoloc" in order to fight the plagiarisms he was finding. The media are singing the praises of this software, although in the test I did of the software in 2004 did not give the software any prizes - it was only able to correctly determine whether an essay was a plagiarism or not in 6 of 10 tests (after some problems getting it to run). I will be repeating this test this summer, more on that to come.

I find it troubling, though, that software that purports to fight plagiarism itself uses a layout that is a blatent plagiarism of Google's layout.....

Plagiarius Award 2007

It's that time of year again, not only for the Berlinale Bears to be awarded, but for the Plagiarius, the black dwarf with a golden nose, for the "best" product plagiarism of the past year.

The "winner" this year, the jug "Sophie", is a gem, made in China.

This award began in 1977, according to their web site, and it "serves to inform the public about the problem of fakes and plagiarisms and the negative impacts they have on not only the economy as a whole, but also on small companies and designers."

In the spring they will be opening a museum for design plagiarisms in Solingen, home of many steel-working small industries.