The collective wisdom of the Supreme Court Justices vs Microsoft Word

I have always known that justice is on my side when I was accused of plagiarism. You see, in college, I accidentally deleted 99 reference citations when I used someone else's work in writing my paper. I accidentally deleted terms like "According to Machiavelli", "as argued by Foucault", or "Marx cited...." Had I raised my case to the Supreme Court of the Philippines, I would have been cleared of the plagiarism charges. (Hindi tuloy ako naka-graduate ngayon.)

In a recent case invoving a Supreme Court Magistrate himself, a case very related to my plagiarism charge, the Supreme Court ruled that (from GMA news)

Del Castillo [the SC Magistrate] did not commit plagiarism because when his researcher "cut" research materials from a law website and "pasted" them on the decision's main manuscript, the attributions were "accidentally deleted."

The mistake of Justice del Castillo's researcher is that, after the Justice had decided what texts, passages, and citations were to be retained, including those from the Criddle-Descent and Ellis, and when she was already cleaning up her work and deleting all subject tags, she unintentionally deleted the footnotes that went with such tags — with disastrous effect," said the SC.

See? That was exactly what happened to me. I just accidentally deleted the reference citations and footnotes showing the original source of the idea in my paper. And because I am just a human, I really cannot easily detect if part or partial of my paper has been copied/pasted without proper attribution. If there is anyone or anything to be blamed, I think Microsoft's operating system is the culprit. Again, in the recent case mentioned above, SC ruled:

The court also held that Del Castillo cannot be accused of plagiarism because the program used in writing the decision cannot detect "copied and pasted" material, so to speak.

 During their deliberation, the Justices ruled, in essence, that the culprit is no less than the Windows operating system itself!

Microsoft Word program does not have a function that raises an alarm when original materials are cut up or pruned. The portions that remain simply blend in with the rest of the manuscript, adjusting the footnote number and removing any clue that what should stick together had just been severed," said the SC.

See? If I directly copied materials from a certain website, say, www.lipofuzereviews.com, would MS Word detect that? I guess not. The software application is very stupid. Or if it not stupid, it is not very intelligent as well so as to detect copied ideas and alarm the user!

Tsk tsk tsk.

With this SC decision, we can now be assured that students who have good intentions of just using another's idea or work who just happen to accidentally delete the reference citations (like in my case, 99 reference citations) will be protected by law.

Good job, Supreme Court Justices. Bad job, Bill Gates.