Plagiarism is the process of using or closely imitating the language or thoughts of an author and claiming it to be an original creation. It is concerned with the gain of false reputation by making false claims about his work.

The term "content scraping" is used describe copy and paste material from websites. This affects both the established websites and the blogs. Several free tools are available online to identify this act. Also there are a number of approaches which can limit copying of texts online. These include placing of warning banners and disabling the right click button which can check scraping of contents online. If plagiarism involves violation of copyright, the owners of the content can send a DMCA removal notice to the owner of the site that has committed the offense. The notice can also be sent by the rightful owners to the Internet Service Provider who is hosting the site that has committed the offense. The term is not only limited to copying of text from a website but also includes the presentation of thoughts and ideas of another person as one's own.

There are several detection services which can detect this act of copying of text word-by-word. The process of finding out instances of copying in a document or a work is termed as plagiarism detection. Widespread usage of computers and the popularity of internet have made the process of plagiarizing the work of others very simple.

You can detect this act of copying either manually or you may even take the assistance of a computer. You need to make significant efforts and have exceptional memory to detect plagiarism manually and it is impossible in cases where you have to compare with a number of documents or the original document is not available for comparison. You have higher chances of successful detection with computer-assisted detection as numerous collections are available for comparing the document.

An internet SEO can be helpful to detect plagiarism if you are looking for particular key sentences or keywords in a suspected document in the internet. It is very effective for small and distinctive fragments such as a poem or translation of a poet. But it will not be effective if the fragments have been taken from a number of sources and if there is no index of the original source available with the search engine. It is very effective for detecting blatant cases. This method also requires much effort for investigating the suspected document.

The systems that can be used to detect copying of text document are CopyTracker, SeeSources, Plagium, eTBLAST and Chimpsky. All of these except Copy Tracker are web-based. These systems are available free of cost.

The commercial plagiarism systems include Plagiarismdetect, Copyscape, Plagiarism-detector, Plagiarismscanner, Ephorus, SafeAssign, Scanmyessay, Urkund, Turnitin, Crot, PlagScan and VeriGuide.

Copying of computer code is frequent and noteworthy research has been done to detect the act of copying of academic program.

The systems used for detection of copying of academic programs are JPlag, MOSS and Plagium. JPlag and MOSS are available for free but you have to register and the software will remain proprietary. These systems are available online. A number of personal ones such as AC, CodeSuite, Sherlock, Plaggie, SID, YAP and SIM are also available.