Relatively, the world wide web is still in its infancy, but plagiarism is already a major problem.

Since 2009, the amount of plagiarized content on the internet has leapt from 25 percent to 44 percent last year, and this uptrend is expected to continue through 2012. File-sharing, as you might expect, is the number one source of plagiarism, but web and video content are also heavily copied and shared, and a lot of that takes place on social media.

While it’s hard to accuse the humble Twitter Retweet and Facebook Share of plagiarism, re-packaging other people’s content and hosting it on your website, and sharing that to social networks, happens all the time. None the wiser, Joe Public blindly shares this pseudo-content, and sometimes the latter can overtake the former in the accumulation of Retweets and Likes.

Is copy and paste the future of the internet? This infographic might help you decide.

(Source: Plagtracker. Copy and paste image via Shutterstock.)