Craig Wright’s LLM Dissertation is Full of Plagiarism
Note: This article has been updated since its original publication. The update can be found at the end of the article.
Plagiarism is more serious than most people think. It is a criminal breach of the copyright act and is also a criminal fraud
— Craig Wright, 2008 (link)
Plagiarism varies in its extent. It goes from simply rephrasing the ideas of another without referencing your sources right through to the literal block copy of paragraphs of text and the theft of entire passages.
This literal copying is a form of fraud and theft. In some cases, the aim is not an accidental unacknowledged phrase but deception. The author wants to use the works of another as their own. In this “uniquely secretive form of theft” the author is asserting a level of skill, knowledge and expertise that they do not exhibit on their own. They are using the work and study of another to lift their own lack of ability. (…)Some, and this has been attributed to many individuals state that “to steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research”.
This makes light of the damage that the fraud and deception of plagiarism causes, but more importantly, it detracts from real research. A good researcher uses the ideas of others, but also attributes the sources— Craig Wright, 2011 (link)
Craig Wright completed his LLM (Master of Laws; a postgrad academic law degree) in International Commercial Law for Northumbria University in 2008. His dissertation submitted February of that year is titled The Impact of Internet Intermediary Liability. Here is a link to the 90-page paper.
The work is heavily plagiarized. Much of the text is taken — both in paraphrase and verbatim form— from other works with no credit given.
The following breakdown is a work in progress and is not exhaustive; more may be added as it is uncovered.
Hilary E Pearson, Liability of Internet Service Providers (1996)
Wright appropriated the majority of the text in Pearson’s 14 pages, making no mention of the author in his paper. He copied Pearson’s opening paragraphs word-for-word and used them in his own Introduction.
Here are some other examples of verbatim copying, highlighted to help identify them between the two texts:
The majority of the plagiarized material was reworded rather than copied verbatim. Here is an example of Wright’s line-by-line rewording of Pearson’s work, with highlighting added for assistance:
Pearson’s Liability of Internet Service Providers contains 58 paragraphs. Wright appropriated 45 of them; 25 in full and 20 in large part. This plagiarism is extensive and methodical, and cannot be explained away as an oversight in neglecting to cite the author.
Wright also took and reworded a section of another of Pearson’s works, Intellectual Property and the Internet: A Comparison of U.K. and U.S. Law (1998), again without citation:
Ronald Mann & Seth Belzley, The Promise of Internet Intermediary Liability (2005)
This similarly-titled work is featured in the dissertation’s bibliography and the work and its authors are referenced several times in Wright’s text. However, the profligacy and closeness of the borrowing should be noted — particularly the wholesale copying of footnotes. Pages 19, 21–27, 30–33, 50–51, and 59 are substantially taken from Promise, as is a large part of Wright’s conclusion (p.82).
Here is one example of a lengthy footnote that Wright copied verbatim from Mann and Bezley’s original without noting the source:
In some cases it’s whole blocks of footnotes. In copying these over to his manuscript, Wright was careful to remove the references to Mann & Belzley’s own footnotes list, as shown in the Kraakman entry:
Part II of Wright’s dissertation in particular relies heavily on the Mann & Belzley paper. Part II, Sections A and B (pp. 19–27) of Impact are essentially an extended paraphrase of Part II, Sections A and B of Promise (pp. 9–14). Here is a view of that part of Wright’s dissertation with the reworded (pink) and verbatim (red) parts highlighted. The blue highlights indicate parts for which Wright credited the original work:
This close-up example from Section II shows how Wright reworded Mann and Belzley’s original work for his own, with highlighting added for assistance:
Even the structure of Wright’s paper in large part follows Promise; in the image below, you’ll find many of the items in Wright’s Table of Contents are identical to those in Promise, or reworded, and appear in the same order:
Heather A Harrison Dinniss, Tools of the Trade: Intellectual Property Issues in Electronic Commerce Tools (2001)
Wright used this author’s material without credit.
Pink highlight = reworded
Red highlight = verbatim
To fortify his plagiarized section on Metatags, Wright included a footnote copying verbatim the abstract from Paul Graham’s Metatags — The Latest Developments (2000). No credit given to the author.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia’s Terms of Use state that any contributions to the site can be freely distributed and used by others “so long as that use is properly attributed”. Wright used text from Wikipedia articles for his own paper without citing his source or crediting the contributor. In terms of bad practice this is probably lesser an offense than the preceding entries, but it should be noted.
Here is an example from the entry for Vicarious Liability (as it appeared in 2008); in which Wright reworded a lengthy passage line by line with no attribution given:
Other sources
There are other, more minor examples of unattributed sources. Some may also fall in a gray area with regard to plagiarism; and to spare the reader more comparison images these can just be listed:
•Crispian Balmer, Court: Yahoo! Must Bar French From Nazi Sites, ABC News (6 Jan 2006)
•Dennis Crouch, Sale of product through an intermediary can create personal jurisdiction for patent infringement., Patently-O (19 Jan 2005)
•Breach of Confidence, HSE.gov.uk
•What Is A Patent?, IPAustralia.gov.au
•Joseph W. Glannon, Civil Procedure, or course outline 2006
•ECJ’s Advocate General says no handing traffic information in civil cases, EDRI-Gram (European Digital Rights) newsletter (1 Aug 2007)
This list is not exhaustive and may be added to as more is discovered.
Bonus
In 2011 Wright posted a two-part blog post on Infosec Island titled Internet Piracy, Plagiarism and the Security Professional (Part1, part 2). In it, Wright is positively scathing in his denunciation of plagiarists, calling them “dishonest”, “unethical” frauds.
Wright reserves special scorn for “security professionals” who plagiarize. He gives two examples — one of whom, Jo Stewart-Rattray, Wright himself had endeavored to expose some years prior (as described in Wright’s blog) by contacting the editors of the magazine in which the offending material was published.
Wright praises the magazine for quickly removing the article. He claims Rattray contacted him with a contrite explanation, but dismisses it as a “feeble excuse”.
Incredibly, this same two-part post in which Wright excoriates plagiarists is filled with the very same plagiarized text from his dissertation detailed above.
The very first line reuses the same rewording of Pearson that Wright used in Impact:
Part 2, which is almost entirely reused text from Wright’s dissertation, contains more plagiarized content. All of the highlighted text in the below image is taken from either Pearson or Mann & Belzley:
UPDATE: 10 April 2020
Since this article was published yesterday it has generated some elevated discussion on social media. The discussion evidently found its way to Craig Wright, who promptly undertook to revise his paper and get the new version onto SSRN.
The page where Wright’s paper is hosted now indicates that a review of the revision is in progress:
The earlier version of the paper (the one I used for this article) is now unavailable for download from SSRN, and has been replaced with the revised version.
Here is a comparison of page 16 of the earlier version vs. the new version Wright posted today:
We can see Wright has added a reference to Pearson. But given Wright’s extensive and methodical appropriation of this author’s work — covering a large majority of Pearson’s original 14-page text — the adequacy of this singular citation is questionable at best.
