Written by Jonathan Bailey, copyright and plagiarism consultant with CopyByte and author of PlagiarismToday.

Since Jessica last talked about this case, Johann Hari, a columnist and interviewer for Britain’s “The Independent” has been forced to watch as the allegations against him deepen and the damage to his reputation and his paper’s grows by the day. According to readers, Hari took quotes from other sources and presented them as if they were things said in his interviews.

Though Hari didn’t claim other’s words as his own, over the past few weeks Hari has been suspended from the paper pending an internal investigation, which is expected to take two months, and has already had his prestigious George Orwell prize revoked.

Whether or not the scandal rises to the level of plagiarism, something Hari denies even in his apologies, it’s clear that it has brought a great deal of disrepute both to his name and a good deal of headache to The Independent, all at a time when British journalism is already reeling from other, much larger scandals.

However, the entire incident could have been easily avoided. Technology exists already that can detect these kinds of reuses and give businesses a chance to correct these problems before they become issues “in the wild”.

Despite this, most companies don’t take advantage of these tools. Fearing either high costs or employee backlash. But as the Hari case proves, there’s a lot to be risked by not taking preventative steps and, sadly, it’s not just newspapers and magazines that need to be concerned.

More Than Just Plagiarism Scandals

Though it’s tempting to think plagiarism and copy detection tools are useful solely for detecting plagiarists, it’s far from the case. As the Hari case shows, there’s a wide variety of ways content can be reused that creates problems and, as such, it’s generally worthwhile to detect and prevent duplicate content whenever possible.

Consider just some of the potential problems that can arise from unethically or unlawfully duplicated content:

Marc Hauser, a prominent Harvard psychology professor, recently resigned after being found guilty of scientific research misconduct. Hauser was renowned in the field of evolutionary biology, particularly in regards to his research with animal cognition and neuro-development. His ground-breaking work had previously been featured across numerous scientific publications, books, news articles and television programs.

It’s been only a few months since German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg resigned after being accused of plagiarizing his doctorate. Now two more German politicians have resigned and been stripped of their Ph.D’s as a result of plagiarism.

Last month Silvana Koch-Mehrin, a leading politician of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), and previously vice president of the European Parliament, was investigated by the The University of Heidelberg for plagiarism in her thesis, revocation of her Ph.D as the final result. According to DW-World.de, 120 passages on 80 different pages from nearly 30 different publications (and two-thirds of those not accurately cited) in her thesis were plagiarized.

Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, also a member of the Free Democrats (FDP), is the latest German politician to be revoked of his doctorate for plagiarism. The faculty at the University of Bonn invested his Ph.D thesis and found enough evidence to revoke the doctorate degree.

All three of these political figures had different excuses to the accusation of plagiarism.

Having recently joined iThenticate in its quest to help professionals detect and prevent plagiarism, I've been immersed in plagiarism cases across different industries to familiarize myself with the scope of scholarly misconduct. I have dealt with minor issues of plagiarism in my marketing career, mostly other blogs copying and pasting content verbatim. Up until a few months ago, however, I wasn't aware of the magnitude of plagiarism outside of academia.

Johann Hari has certainly set off a media frenzy the past two weeks challenging the definition of plagiarism. Last week it was discovered that Hari, columnist for the British newspaper the Independent and winner of the Orwell Prize, has a habit of taking statements or quotes from other reporters' interviews and inserting them into his own interview article as if the person had said it to him instead of the original reporter. Of course, without credit to the original reporter.