The highest level of copying was recorded in the Theses of the Faculty of Medicine, which reached an exorbitant 70 percent of copied pages; followed by the Faculty of Economics at 65 percent; Agriculture at 53 percent and finally Law at 50 percent of the copied texts. Logically, beyond the crime itself, given the infringement of the Law, plagiarism entails a potential reputational damage as well as an economic one to the original author. On one hand, the graduate may evoke compassion and - perhaps - empathy in some, but the damage caused to the researcher or the research team is quite different. After years of study and rigorous methodological research, they see the fruit of their labor stolen for a copied article and fed to the highest bidder.
Anyone with the intellectual capacity to produce original and unpublished content is then extremely vulnerable to having their content copied, without the effective ability to promptly and efficiently protect their moral and economic rights over it. This applies to both unpublished works and published works. The phenomenon has spread with the advent of open sources, open data, and increasingly advanced automatic language processing software, culminating in LLM-based artificial intelligence tools. (Large Language Model). Professors, faculty boards, and supervisors are unable to put a stop to it, even though they suspect an increasingly massive use of copied texts presented as one's own without citing or including the original authors and sources in the bibliography.
One cannot ignore the risk, for a student, of not having their efforts recognized; or for the researcher, seeing years of work dissipate in a few moments. The academic framework itself would be affected, as on one hand, Theses and Articles are public acts, but on the other hand, they are not sufficiently protected in their content. To achieve this, a service capable of permanently and comprehensively marking the unpublished work and assigning it both a certain date and a certain attribution would be necessary.
Maenoox is a service based on blockchain technology that allows the creation of NFTs capable of fully protecting the document, in any format, even before its distribution, thus ensuring that the author can confidently claim intellectual property rights over any potentially plagiarized content.