Plagiarism

Two students and their professor found plagiarising multiple papers from famous authors and publishing them in high profile ACM publications:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/08/plagiarism_and.html

I was tired of Pakistanis cursing those people from that uni and blaming them for everything. I think we should learn from it. That is what intelligent nations do: learn from their mistakes, never to repeat them. I would just like to add one aspect to this discussion: that is our character. It is not only research culture that is important, but also character is important. I am studying in Europe and as others, i have found their studies no better than those in Pakistan. In fact i have attended here that lecture which i have taught in FAST lahore many times and i am confident that the Dr here didn't teach it any better than us (if not worse). Here they have two semesters per year and lots of holidays. Similarly, their researchers spend far less hours per week in their universities than us. They go back from work at 5 or 6 pm. They rarely work on Saturdays and working on Sunday is a sin here. So it is something else that has developed them.

All of us were very quick to blame to an extreme these people who did palgiarism. Yes they did wrong, but is there anyone among us who can claim he has never done anything similar? or that he has never cheated in exams? or that he has never copied assignments? I have caught copies in assignments in all courses i taught and i had to stop everytime afraid that the whole class will be failed by me due to cheating; so i failed only very serious cases. We had a teacher from abroad who asked us to write a paper. and later he declared in the class that if the papers submitted by us were really written by us, he would send us on the next flight to MIT in USA. How can such people blame others for cheating? Here i can't think of any German cheating in Uni or in his daily life. They just don't think of it. and all the pakistanis here learn nothing from them. They do all their normal cheating here as well. Even people posing to be very pious do it, let alone others. And they feel very happy by fooling the Germans. It is not the Europeans we are fooling my brothers; it is us who are becoming fools. Germans are not harmed by our cheating, only we are.

So after analyzing this situation, we should always try to put up a solution as well. My suggestion is that we all promise to ourselves that none of us will ever cheat again, no matter what the people around us do. We won't lie, cheat, fraud, take/give bribery, use "sifarish", skip our duties, break a traffic signal, throw a rapper on road, abuse each other, etc... Only and only then can the rightful get their rights in our country. Only then, the hardworkers will get their reward here, just like they get in USA or Europe. If we make this promise then we can blame these plagiarisers and any future wrong-doers. Otherwise, we have no right whatsoever to blame anyone for any kind of cheating.