Fighting "term paper mills," and bigger problems

An article in the Badger-Herald notes that a Professor Chad Weidner has a lawsuit against the "paper mill" R2C2 and its owner Rusty Carroll. Although one can readily see why an academic might have problems with a company that sells term papers and the like, one notes that there are similar areas wherein academics don't take such strong stands.

For example, Dean Velvel suggested the Laurence Tribe plagiarism matter was more of a matter wherein Tribe had students ghost-write his book. Is there a significant difference between a professor paying students to ghost-write and students paying a "paper mill" for someone else's work?

And what about all those Congressmen who entered text into the Congressional Record, as if written by the Congressmen, when the text was written by one lobbyist?

See also

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2009/11/ghost-writing-plagiarism-in-biosimilar.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/08/plagiarism-or-ghost-writing.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2005/05/velvel-on-tribe-matter.html

***In the Badger-Herald article, Weidner is quoted:

“I think it is important to teach students that there are no shortcuts, and that real research is both time consuming and difficult. To think that there is some kind of quick fix, be it a paper sold online, a paper borrowed from a peer or creative rewriting of an academic’s work is just unacceptable.”

***Or, pushing the envelope further, when one professor agrees to adopt the position of another professor, in writing and in reviewing the work of others, for political, rather than academic ends, is there a problem? See

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2009/11/perils-of-collaborative-peer-review.html