Demarcating a Linguistic Expert’s and an Authorship Investigator’s Competencies When Examining Copyright and Related Rights Objects

A controversial issue of the demarcation between a linguistic expert’s and an authorship investigator’s competencies when conducting forensic examinations in cases related to copyright and related rights violations is considered. In this category of cases there is mainly a need to deal with the task of ascertaining particularities of texts related to the fact of plagiarism that is the comparison of texts to reveal matching fragments, presence of borrowing, its direction which is the task of a linguistic expertise. Tasks which fall under the authorship investigator’s purview are associated with the examination of written language skill and aim to determine the authorship and text drafting conditions. Formerly researchers did not separate the tasks of linguistic and authorship investigations indicating the lack of methodological development of the issue. The article suggests some methodological approaches to solving the main tasks of linguistic expertise on cases involving copyright and related rights violations developed as a result of an overview of the practice of conducting such examinations in the Russian Federal Centre of Forensic Science of the Russian Ministry of Justice.

forensic examination of intellectual property, forensic linguistic expertise, forensic authorship investigation, plagiarism, indications of written language, written language skills, product of speech activity, comparison of speech products, direction of borrowing

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