Russian school student invents flawless computer program for copyright protection

The program employs several search engines of the Internet at a time

The electronic editor has an official name “Copyright verification program.” It uses the Internet for detecting manifest similarities in hundreds of thousands of texts available on the Internet.

We tested a part of a school composition on Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. Sasha Matorin, the inventor of the program, connected to the Net and received the results in a minute. The program indicated that the text's originality equaled zero. The electronic editor found a part of the text on one web site while the last sentence of the text in question was found on the other web site. The program also reported on the location of the web sites containing texts identical to “our” text.

The inventor of the program says that it employs several search engines of the Internet at a time. A text's size is virtually unlimited. A tome like Ulysses can be tested for originality. The program will automatically divide the novel into several parts to come up with a general result later on. Sasha was writing the program all summer. The work became his term paper on informatics during his final year in school.

“These days plagiarism is a commonplace phenomenon,” says Sacha's teacher on informatics and a former schoolmaster Andrei Novikov. “Indeed, it is a lot easier to simply download a composition or term paper material from the Internet than spend sleepless nights working on the subject,” adds he.

A computer company, a software trader, from the city of Saratov has showed interest in the young man's invention.

Over the last few years Sasha Matorin has won a number of prestigious programmers' contests for computer graphics, design and animation. He also writes music on his computer. Last year in Malta he won the top prize for his droll video about the benefits of learning foreign languages.

Andrei Novikov says that sometimes school children produce real inventions especially in the field of physics and informatics. Shasha's classmate Roma Byalov built a computer remote control device for a toy tractor. The boy became a winner of the All-Russian engineering competition among the youngsters. Another graduate of the same Saratov school designed a new fire alarm system detector. But in most case all those inventions end up sitting on the dusty shelves, says the teacher with a sigh. Today it is easy to claim ownership on something that is not yours. Meanwhile, it is extremely difficult to patent your own invention.