Great minds think alike

A summary of plagiarism in Germany in the past two years.

The other day, Mr. Guttenberg, former golden boy, defense secretary and one time most popular German politician popped up in the press after an interview with a Swiss newspaper. He is boycotting German media.

Mr. Guttenberg [post about German nobility is TBD] resigned a couple of years ago in the wake of a plagiarism scandal. 

His PhD thesis turned out to make liberal use of other people's research -- a required feature -- without giving appropriate credits -- not so good.

The K-landnews team understands he was way too busy to add all the footnotes. Instead of hounding people like him, ultimately making them suffer for the incompetence of software developers, we propose a solution.

A scientifically adequate Copy & Paste feature in word processing software.

Don't you dare and nix the idea without evaluation. Remember the dark ages of software, when Copy & Paste would only work on a piece of text?

Over time, developers learned how to add images and other objects to Copy & Paste to make it the feature we use and love today.

Who says you cannot add an automatic footnoting feature to it?

This way, the sacrifices of Mr. Guttenberg, Mrs. Koch-Mehrin, Mrs. Schavan, and numerous as yet unknown other victims of a bad Copy & Paste feature, would not have been in vain. Vain, yes, in vain, no.

You still think the Copy & Paste feature is not to blame?

In that case, all these plagiarists -- could they simply be victims of the acknowledged fact that great minds think alike, and hence would be expected to write alike, too?