The LexisNexis data collection service has introduced CopyGuard, a program aimed at exposing plagiarists or spotting copyright infringement. According to John Barrie, chief executive of iParadigms, the company that developed the program with LexisNexis, CopyGuard can generate a report that calculates the percentage of material suspected of not being original, highlights that text and pinpoints its possible original source, all within seconds.

"We take digital fingerprints of individual documents and compare them to the digital fingerprints of existing documents," Barrie said.

Existing programs from iParadigm and others have focused on plagiarism by students, not journalists. CopyGuard, which is available by subscription (the company would not divulge the price of the service) draws on LexisNexis' database of more than six billion documents and several years' worth of Web pages archived by iParadigm. In addition to checking newspaper and magazine articles, CopyGuard can be used by publishers to scan book manuscripts.

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