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In October 2015, a New York district court ruled in favor of the academic publisher Elsevier, which had accused Sci-Hub, a website that offers pirated versions of academic papers, of copyright violation. That decision allowed authorities to take down the site’s domain name, sci-hub.org. Suspending a domain name does not delete a website forever, though, it just prevents visitors from knowing where exactly to find it. It’s trivial enough to relaunch the same site under another domain, as Sci-Hub did.

Cairo University, Egypt’s biggest state-run academic institution, has initiated an action plan against thriving but unlawful ‘teaching centres’ in its vicinity, accusing them of “undermining the educational process”. The centres, located just outside campus, are accused of pirating academic books, producing sub-standard study guides and holding fee-charging crash courses for students. Academics, whose books have allegedly been pirated by the centres, say their complaints to law-enforcement authorities have not drawn a response.

In an unprecedented crackdown on academic misconduct, as many as 179 university professors from some 110 universities in South Korea were indicted on Monday after an extensive criminal investigation into a huge copyright scam. The professors have been charged with republishing existing textbooks written by others under their own names by modifying the covers with the alleged connivance of the publishing companies.

In south Korea, a case of plagiarism has shaken the academic world. 200 professors from 50 different universities have been accused of appropriating books by other authors. Their technique to avoid discovery? These unscrupulous academics simply changed the original covers of the publications and added their own names. According to the Korea Herald, some of the alleged culprits are well known assistant professors.

Student plagiarism help site? Academics and administration officials at Concordia and McGill universities are raising concerns over Course Hero, a note-sharing website for students which boasts more than just notes. Looking at only a few of its hundreds of pages, CBC Montreal Investigates found 35 chapters lifted from textbooks, and 56 professors' presentations.

In the technical world of bio-informatics, two University of Kansas computer scientists were riding high in 2009 having published three articles with an international audience. Portions of all three of their articles had been lifted from other scientists' work. The entire summarizing statement in their presentation had come from someone else's journal article.