> McCarthy used plagiarism software to compare the text of North’s translations—about a million words in all—with the text of Shakespeare’s plays—another millio

> McCarthy used plagiarism software to compare the text of North’s translations—about a million words in all—with the text of Shakespeare’s plays—another million words. When he did, his computer lit up like a Christmas tree, displaying thousands of phrases in common, many found in similar situations and contexts, and many unique in English. Some were up to eight words long, the equivalent of hitting every number in a Powerball ticket and then some. So, all the way back in high school, we were required to submit all of our essays through a plagiarism detection software. This would routinely mark up our essays to be about 10-20% plagiarized, and having actually written my own essays myself, I can attest that all of that is false positive. When you're highlighting that the longest span of such text is only eight words, that screams to me "pure false positive." Hell, in modern times, try suing someone over a copyright violation of a mere eight words and you're liable to be laughed out of court. This information is useless without controlling for other works known to not be plagiarized from one another to find a typical false positive rate.