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Plagiarism is rampant. As you read this, someone might be surreptitiously copying and pasting this article into WordPress, hoping to impress their six readers. But not all plagiarists are content with simply passing off random web content as their own. Some aim higher, and in doing so, they end up looking completely foolish.
10. Erik Highsmith and the Children's Essay Incident
In 2012, college football player Erik Highsmith faced a challenge that many students dread: actual work. As part of his Communications class, Highsmith was assigned to write a blog post about poultry farming. With his sports commitments taking precedence, Highsmith resorted to the quickest option he could think of: plagiarizing the entire assignment. His source? A group of 11-year-old kids.
Highsmith copied the opening paragraph of an article written by a group of sixth graders for an educational website, then combined it with another essay he'd found elsewhere. He attempted to cover his tracks by altering the order of words just enough to not be immediately obvious. While the original sentence read: 'Poultry farming is raising chickens, turkeys, ducks, and other fowl for meat or eggs,' Highsmith’s version began with: 'Poultry farming is raising of turkeys, ducks, chicken, and other fowl for meat or eggs.' He also mixed in his own sentences, rewriting bullet points into short prose.
Surprisingly, this attempt at subterfuge was insufficient to bypass UNC's plagiarism detection software. Highsmith was quickly exposed as the person who had plagiarized from sixth graders.
9. Nancy Stouffer Creates Harry Potter
When a series like Harry Potter becomes a cash cow, countless people are eager to cash in. Yet none has been as blatant as Nancy Stouffer. An unpublished author, Stouffer not only took inspiration from J.K. Rowling’s work but also went as far as accusing Rowling of plagiarism.
In 2002, Stouffer took legal action against Rowling. Several years earlier, Stouffer had written a series featuring a character named Larry Potter and a group of people known as muggles. She claimed that Rowling had stolen these ideas and turned them into a multimillion-dollar empire. The case was taken seriously enough that it went to trial. It wasn’t long before it became evident that Stouffer’s accusations were baseless.
Investigators discovered that a crucial part of Stouffer’s manuscript had been added long after the original text. While most of the book was written in a font from the 1980s, this particular passage was in a typeface that wouldn’t even exist until years after she claimed to have completed her work. The court dismissed her lawsuit and fined her $50,000 for wasting the judicial system’s time.
8. Gordon Gould Develops And Loses The Laser
In late 1957, former Manhattan Project scientist Gordon Gould had an epiphany that would alter the course of science. Drawing from Charles Towne’s work on the maser (a microwave emitter), Gould realized it was possible to create a concentrated light beam capable of cutting through steel. He named his discovery the LASER and eagerly turned to Towne for advice. Unfortunately, this decision proved to be a mistake.
While Towne publicly supported Gould’s work, he secretly patented the key concepts behind the laser, all while misleading Gould about how to properly secure credit for his discovery. It wasn’t until 1959 that Gould realized the betrayal, by which time Towne had already secured the patent and was profiting from selling the laser technology worldwide.
A grueling 30-year legal battle ensued, with Gould fighting for recognition of his invention. It wasn’t until 1988 that the courts finally ruled in his favor, granting him rightful ownership of the laser. By then, Towne had already received a Nobel Prize for the very technology Gould had created. Tragically, Gould didn’t get to claim victory. When Towne passed away in January 2015, nearly every obituary credited him as the 'inventor of the laser.'
7. Margaret Knight Discovers Women Can’t Invent
Margaret Knight, a 19th-century factory worker from New England, rose from humble beginnings to become a prolific inventor. By the age of 12, she had already designed a device to prevent shuttlecock injuries in textile mills. However, her most significant invention was nearly stolen from her. After building a wooden prototype of a machine to fold paper bags in 1870, she sent it to Boston to be cast in iron, then applied for a patent. Unfortunately, Charles Annan had seen her prototype and managed to patent it first.
If that wasn’t enough, Annan went out of his way to add insult to injury. When questioned about his patent, he arrogantly claimed that no woman could have possibly created something so 'complicated.'
This led to a legal battle in which Annan's defense relied on the notion that women were too ignorant to understand mechanics. The judge allowed this baseless argument to continue for 16 days before delivering the final ruling. Fortunately, the story had a positive resolution. The court ruled in favor of Knight, granting her the patent, while Annan went down in history as one of the most misguided litigants in legal history.
6. The Romance Writer And The Ferrets
Ferrets might not top most people's list of sexy topics, but apparently, trashy romance author Cassie Edward missed the memo. In her 2008 novel Shadow Bear, there's an odd chapter where two characters interrupt their passionate moment to engage in an in-depth discussion about ferrets. This unexpected detour became the center of a major scandal. Instead of researching, Edward took the entire ferret section from another source.
The source of her dialogue was a 2005 article titled “Toughing it Out in the Badlands” by wildlife journalist Paul Tolme. This brief piece focused on the endangered black-footed ferret, an article completely out of place in a romance novel. Yet, Edward reproduced it verbatim and put it into the mouths of her love-stricken characters. She later claimed she didn’t realize she needed to credit Tolme, but by then, the damage was already done. Her publisher terminated her contract, and Tolme found humor in writing an article about it.
5. The Archaeologists And The Forgotten Civilization
In the early 19th century, travelers from Britain, France, and America made a remarkable discovery. Buried beneath the sands of modern Sudan lay the remains of the ancient biblical kingdom of Kush. The Greeks had called them Ethiopians, or the 'Burned-Faced Ones,' and described the Kushites as a civilization of remarkable beauty and piety. However, the notion that such a grand culture could have been created by black people was too much for German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius to accept. He immediately set about proving that white people had built it instead.
Using deliberate misinterpretation and fabricated evidence, Lepsius persuaded the world that the Kushites, being black, could never have built such an advanced civilization. He instead claimed that the light-skinned Egyptians were the true creators, arguing that the Greeks had mistakenly labeled them as Ethiopians. This misleading idea gained traction and held sway until the mid-20th century, when the civil rights movement effectively dismantled such pseudoscientific theories.
4. The Writer And The Sneaky Studio
In the 1980s, award-winning journalist Art Buchwald pitched an eight-page movie treatment to Paramount Studios. Titled King for a Day, the story centered on an African prince who comes to America, loses everything, and ends up living in a Washington ghetto, leading to predictably humorous situations. At one point, Paramount even considered casting Eddie Murphy as the culturally confused prince. However, the studio eventually lost interest in the project.
If you find that story familiar, you’re not alone. It’s nearly identical to the 1988 film Coming to America, produced by Paramount after Buchwald had pitched his idea to Warner Bros. The blatant similarities led to Buchwald losing his contract with Warner Bros. The final twist came when Paramount included a title card in Coming to America that read “from a story by Eddie Murphy.”
The ensuing legal battle lasted for years. Buchwald ultimately won $900,000 in compensation for Paramount’s theft, though this amount was reportedly far less than his $2.5 million in legal fees.
3. The Real Discovery Of Penicillin
The discovery of penicillin is nothing short of a modern fairy tale. After neglecting to clean a petri dish, Alexander Fleming found that his sample had grown a large patch of green mold capable of killing bacteria. However, instead of recognizing the world-changing potential of his discovery, Fleming dismissed it as useless and stopped his research, leaving it to others to recreate penicillin on his behalf.
Recreating the discovery was no easy feat. Fleming had left behind no notes and had no interest in locating the mold again. It wasn’t until a decade later that a team of scientists from Cambridge saw the mold’s potential and began to study it seriously. The mold was incredibly hard to recreate, supplies were scarce, and any penicillin they managed to isolate was difficult to extract. To make matters worse, World War II had just begun, and the Luftwaffe was constantly bombing them.
After much trial and error, the team finally succeeded in extracting penicillin, but it took additional effort to produce enough to treat patients. In 1940, they managed to successfully treat a case of septicemia. At this point, Alexander Fleming returned to take full credit for the breakthrough.
Although the scientific community acknowledged the team’s role, it was Fleming’s name that became synonymous with the discovery of penicillin. Yet, his only contribution to the breakthrough was failing to properly clean his petri dishes.
2. Stendhal’s Unapologetic Plagiarism
Stendhal, born Marie-Henri Beyle, is celebrated as one of the greatest writers of the 19th century, primarily for his novel *The Red and the Black*. However, in his time, it was his books on travel and music that made him a household name. At least, they were considered 'his' works in the sense that he had outright stolen them. His first three books were essentially identical to works by Italian writer Giuseppe Carpani.
When his plagiarism was uncovered, Stendhal didn’t apologize or even express any shame. Instead, he anonymously wrote letters attacking Carpani, even going so far as to claim the Italian had plagiarized him. When he was finally confronted about his actions, Stendhal’s response was, 'How can you be a plagiarist if you don’t sign your name?'
The public seemed to buy into Stendhal’s justification, and as a result, he faced little to no consequence for his plagiarism. In fact, the renowned German poet Goethe even wrote a glowing review of Stendhal’s *Rome, Naples et Florence*—despite the fact that large portions were directly lifted from Goethe’s own *Italian Journey*.
1. Amazon’s Plagiarism Farms
Have you ever browsed the indie books section of the Kindle store and wondered who the true authors are? The answer is: not always the person credited on the cover. According to a recent report, a staggering number of books available on Amazon Kindle are entirely plagiarized.
With the rise of *Fifty Shades of Grey*, millions of first-time readers began exploring the world of erotica. Some opportunistic individuals seized the chance to steal content from indie romance authors, rebranding it with a new title and selling it as their own. These plagiarized books are not just a minor issue—they've made their way to the top of the Kindle charts, without Amazon ever verifying the originality of the content. Many of these stolen texts were taken from websites where authors share their work freely, without expecting any compensation.
The few attempts by plagiarists to rework the original material are utterly incompetent, demonstrating a poor grasp of even basic English. One book was released under the title Domenating Her, another under OMG My Step-Brother in Bisexual. There’s also one called Dracula’s Amazing Adventure, which is essentially a direct copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula with no changes to the text.
