Unfortunately, pursuing run-of-the-mill plagiarism is difficult and expensive. It’s a civil, not a criminal matter and it’s tough to show material harm. The best thing to do with a serial plagiarist is expose him repeatedly until he becomes a mockery.
We had a guy in my industry plagiarize everything he put out. I contacted the people he ripped off. The attitude ranges from bemusement to guys willing to join in a lawsuit as long as someone else did the heavy lifting.
I didn’t want to call too much attention to him in public because it would have given him free publicity. I did talk with the editors of all major trade magazines and showed each a side by side comparison of the work he claimed as his own and the original. I did this as a warning to the editors that they need to be careful about the potential for liability if any of them published this guy. Now, the only way he can get industry ink is by buying it.
Even exposure doesn’t seem to halt some plagiarists. Joe Biden is a serial plagiarist, having nearly been ejected from school over it and being forced to drop out of a presidential run after one of his democrat competitors identified that Biden’s stump speech was taken nearly word for word from a Brit labor leader. No one in the MSM even talks about it anymore.
Plagiarism is the perfect metaphor for the left. It marks the intellectually lazy, dishonest person, who would rather steal the labor of another than create his own.
You say it’s not a criminal matter. Well, years ago while working for a law firm that was dealt with intellectual property law, there was a case of one guy who did do some jail time for passing off someone else’s copyrighted work as his own. The culprit, a home builder, repeatedly copied an architect’s drawings despite several lawsuits. I’m not exactly sure what the criminal charges were — possibly theft, I guess — the firm wasn’t directly involved in the criminal aspect of the case. Anyway, the jail time was brief, but I think that’s what finally got the home builder’s attention. As far as I know, he never copied the architect’s drawings anymore. Of course, he may have moved on to someone else’s work.