When Google announced its Google Book Search project, publishers and authors closed ranks to protest their work being indexed by Google. Although loss of revenue was ostensibly the big concern, perhaps more than a few were concerned about their plagiaristic tendencies being exposed. An article in Slate by Paul Collins titled Dead Plagiarists Society - Will Google Book Search uncover long-buried literary crimes? describes how as more books are digitized more examples of borrowed content are found.
Today’s web content creators are well aware of how easy it is to spot identical content using search engines, but Victorian authors couldn’t have imagined that an arbitrary sentence could have been extracted from their work and immediately compared to many thousands of other works in seconds. A piece written in 1899 by little-known author England Howlett was found to have borrowed from an earlier writer, Sabine Baring-Gould. Amusingly, Baring-Gould himself seems to have snitched some content from a still earlier author, Benjamin Thorpe.
The examples of plagiarism uncovered to date have been mostly obscure authors. Collins predicts, though, that within the next few years it’s likely that someone will stumble across a work of a major author, of the caliber of Ben Franklin or Emily Dickinson, that contains purloined text. I agree - it seems almost inevitable that this will occur. The only thing that might argue against it is that plagiarism in these oft-read works would have been discovered years ago. True, perhaps, but not if the borrowed content was from an obscure work infrequently read today. I think there’s a real opportunity for office pools at publishers, college English departments, etc. - put your money in, choose an author, and wait. The first player whose author is outed for plagiarism takes the pot. 
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