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Depending on where one would purchase a Rolex watch or other, typically high priced, products of famous brands, the price can vary by orders of magnitude. The reason for this observation can be explained by the existence of cheap replicas, illegal copies of the product. Do such copies exist only in the materialized world, or can they be a matter in academia?
Yes, they can! Today, a colleague of mine discovered that his 2005 Sigmetrics paper [1] has been plagiarised. The copy of his paper has been presented in the 8th IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Computer and Information Science (ICIS 2009), held from June 1-3, 2009 in Shanghai, China. The authors are with the “electronics and information department, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China”.
Who are the authors? Liu Wei is an associate professor. Wenqing Cheng has some history of published papers in recent years and is a professor as well. They should have known the rules. Profiles of the remaining authors could not be found.
Besides the publication of the copied paper in the conference proceedings by IEEE, the copied version of the paper has been selected as an outstanding paper and published by Springer in an additional volume (see [2]). In case you don’t have an ACM or Springer subscription, that would allow you to download the original papers, I created excerpts of the first page of each paper (find there here: original, copy). The paper, including figures, has been copied word by word. The copy has been shortened, typesetted in Microsoft Word instead of LaTeX and adapted to the new page layout. Funny side note: The reference were changed, e.g. [7] has been added as new reference that did not appear in original version of the paper.
If you start looking for other papers by the authors, you might find [3]. To have some more fun, copy some phrases of the abstract and look them up using Google, which will lead to a result like this, showing parts of a book [4] published in 2007. The abstract has been copied almost word by word from two chapters of the book (first sentence from page 327 and the remainder from page 373). Only minor things have been changed: “In this chapter” reads now “In this paper”.
What a disgrace! Or, a very special way of saying that a paper or book is good … 
(We have have taken initial action in those cases. Is there anyone willing to review other papers of those authors for possible cases of plagiarism?)
Update (2009-10-01): I checked another paper: The abstract of [5] has been taken from [6, Chapter 8.4, Page 221] (I can’t download the entire paper due to a lack of subscription). You can use Google Booksearch to verify this. I already mailed to the affected authors and editors.
[1] Original: Florin Ciucu, Almut Burchard and Jörg Liebeherr: “A network service curve approach for the stochastic analysis of networks” (2005)
[2] Copy: Deah J. Kadhim, Saba Q. Jobbar, Wei Liu, and Wenqing Cheng: “The Stochastic Network Calculus Methodology” (2009)
[3] Copy: Nawaf Hadhal Kamil, Deah J. Kadhim, Wei Liu, Wenqing Cheng, “Signal Processing Techniques for Robust Spectrum Sensing,” fcc, pp.120-123, 2009 ETP International Conference on Future Computer and Communication, 2009
[4] Original: Fitzek F H P., Katz M., “Cognitive Wireless Networks: Concepts, Methodologies and Visions Inspiring the Age of Enlightenment of Wireless Communications”, ISBN 978-1-4020-5978-0, 1st: Springer, pp. 714 , 2007
[5] Copy: Deah J. Kadhim, Wei Liu, Wenqing Cheng, “Ultra Wideband Cognitive Network Objective Issues,” fcc, pp.35-38, 2009 ETP International Conference on Future Computer and Communication, 2009
[6] Original: Hossain, E., and V. K. Bhargava (Eds.), Cognitive Wireless Communications Networks, Springer Publication, 2007
