Is this Plagiarism... or Worse?

This morning I noticed a rather strange hit on the site.  Someone googled this:

The film’s setting and period are far from accidental.  Aside from the cosmetic topicality of a Spanish film about the civil war emerging at a time when Spain is going through a process of self-examination regarding the goings on during the civil war and Franco’s regime

This pointed them directly at my review of Pan's Labyrinth.


So I wonder, what could prompt someone to search for a paragraph from a film review.  Did they read the paragraph in my review and think it was so unique that it could not have come from me or did someone maybe stick it in their essay prompting someone to smell a rat and run a search?  or was someone so impressed by the phrase that they noted it down on their exercise book?  Perhaps they were someone's last words smeared on a wall only to be discovered by an over-worked murder Police?  Perhaps a dangerous psychotic has decided to hunt down and murder anyone who uses that phrase?

What a strange world we live in. 

Comments

[Ren]

They *do* love you. Are you ready for your close-up now?

Cecil B. DeMille

[Nicholas Tam]

I'm almost certain, having done it myself, that someone Ctrl-V'd in the address bar without remembering to Ctrl-C. Then again, that begs us to wonder why they would clip the passage in the first place...

(You are big. It's the pictures that got small!)

[Jonathan M]

I didn't know that Ctrl-Ving something into the address bar took you to an instance of that something. That's odd.

I'm not sure I agree with this growing characterisation of myself as an aging diva. Fair enough, I am a bit of a Diva but I'm in my prime damn it!

[Dave Klecha]

Probably plagiarism. The paste into search and then click on the link through the search to a page they had already visited seems unlikely in the extreme. Back in the hoary days of 2001, my history professor (then in his 60s) had figured out how to Google passages from student papers when the language didn't match with what the student had written before. These days, as I understand it, the practice is extremely common. And with Pan's Labyrinth a darling of the critical community (and thus, academia) and schools on the quarter system, like University of Chicago, finishing up finals last week, I think you probably have a perfect storm of student plagiarism potentiality.

And if I ever have the pleasure of being in the same room as you, down the road, I'll be sure to do my nearly famous impression of said history professor. He was, as they say, a hoot.

[Gomisan]

Working at a secondary school I frequently get asked by staff to check out student essays. A quick and easy test is to google phrases or paragraphs from the essay.