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The comprehensive database of academic journals, newspapers, and research papers, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), has lost a legal battle over copyright infringement after a retired professor of economic history accused it of uploading more than 160 of his articles without permission or payment. Beijing Intellectual Property Court has forced the academic platform to remove his papers, pay him more than CNY700,000 (US$110,000) in compensation.

To promote their academic position and for other financial benefits, many teachers including university professors, submit their thesis papers based on plagiarism. Last January, three professors at Dhaka University were dismissed following accusations of plagiarism in their research work. In the last five years at least 10 teachers of the same institution have also been accused of plagiarism or violation of copyright rules in their research works.

Curtin University implicated in unethical research using facial recognition technology to identify Uyghur and Tibetan minorities has lobbied unsuccessfully for the publishers to retract it on several occasions. An internal review of research by a resigned professor at the university found that he breached several ethical codes, including failing to obtain informed consent and approval. The article remains online although Curtin University deputy vice-chancellor has urged the publisher to remove all references to the university.

Academic fraud takes place in epic proportions in Bangladesh, from copying music to copying homework and buying readymade thesis. Contract cheating and plagiarism are not only widespread among students, but it is also practiced by some faculty members of Dhaka University. Also, there are many incidents of the student wing of political parties forcing professors to pass them in an exam after submitting a wrong answer script or without even appearing for it.

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.

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.