They are allowing vendors of commercial plagiarism detection software participate -- I'll be interested to see if any of them do.
The cash prize isn't enough to make them go for it (500 euros) but the good publicity might. I know if I were a school, I'd be more inclined to buy from a company that won this competition.
Let me get this article and idea straight, incase I missed something...
Plagiarism is a problem for copyright holders since they want to ensure that they don't get plagiarized. HOWEVER it is a very expensive task and does not bear as much fruit as it might.
Automation of this will bring many many financial benefits to the copyright holders by reducing costs and increasing detection rates.
And all this work is to be done for a measly 500 euro??? I remember reading a job posting of a guy wanting someone to write a windows-like OS for $500, which is compatible with all windows apps but is more stable/secure/bug free.
"Plagiarism" usually refers to copying in an academic setting (you download an essay and submit as your own; you cut-and-paste together a journal article from other papers and submit it as your own), rather than copyright infringement. In fact, usually the objection is not the copying per se but the passing it off as your own; ie the lack of attribution.
Skimming the page, they've assumed their audience already knows what they mean. I know of a couple of academics interested in this work; and I believe there's quite a large audience. You can imagine that teachers and lectures would like to be able to automatically check for plagiarism (esp hard with the internet when it could be copied from anyone in the world, not just in the one classroom)
You do have a point however. Much like the "recover a disk that has been zeroed out" competition, the prize seems somewhat small for the magnitude of the task.
Admittedly, the prize is more then an order of magnitude higher, (and just requires software), so there might be more takers.
