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Court: Turnitin does not violate student copyrights by scanning homework
The judge presiding over the case ruled that since iParadigms does not republish the stories and "makes no use of any work's particular expressive or creative content beyond the limited use of comparison with other works." Therefore, the judge decided that the whole thing falls under "fair use." There's also the fact that the students kind of, sort of give permission for their papers to be scanned. Really what happens it that schools and teachers decide to use the system and students who don't want to feed their papers into a big computer can refuse to turn them in and take an F. Not really much of a choice, is it?
[via Techdirt]
Comments
14
Subscribe to commentsJim LexMar 26th 2008 10:22AM
Nice try, kids! Better luck next time. Hey, maybe you should go after those Scantron readers since they don't get permission to use the circles you filled in to compare to the answer sheet!
rndmnmeMar 26th 2008 11:19AM
You're neither smart, nor funny and your comparison is totally irrelevant.
Jim LexMar 26th 2008 11:27AM
Apparently SOMEone is upset that they can't plagiarize anymore. I'm sorry for offending you, please forgive me.
DG10050Mar 26th 2008 1:18PM
Apparently SOMEone isn't bothered that teachers will often blindly accept whatever Turnitin.com says and fail a student because they used a phrase that someone else on the far corners of the internet used on their blog.
I don't have an issue with Turnitin.com, but teachers need to actually read the originality report. Many teachers get lazy when they use things like this, figuring that it's doing all the work for them.
jccalhounMar 26th 2008 9:19PM
The problem with Turnitin has nothing to do with plagiarism and everything to do with the fact that Turnitin's business model is basically built on the backs of students. It takes their intellectual property to make their system better and gives them nothing in return. Moreover, they charge schools for this service. So indirectly either through tuition or taxes students or their parents are paying for the privilege of being accused of cheating, giving away their intellectual property, and helping Turnitin enlarge their database.
As a graduate student I am both a student and a teacher. If I were told to turn over my intellectual property to this company with a presumption that I was a plagiarist I would refuse. As a teacher I refuse to do that to my students. If I suspect my students of plagiarism I have this little thing called "google" that I use to find evidence of their plagiarism since that is where they usually get their papers from anyway.
Jordan RunningMar 26th 2008 10:56AM
Maybe students should start putting EULAs on their cover pages. "By reading this essay you agree not to submit it to any plagiarism-detection service...."
AndyMar 26th 2008 11:32AM
I would assume it's still the same, but last year when I used TURNITIN, when submitting an assignment, you agree to sign over all rights of ownership to turnitin, thus rendering your essay as theirs. Not so fair that you aren't in control of your own work.
Plagiarism scanning makes sense, but this company is making a profit out of something that should be controlled by the universities, not some third party. Part of my tuition goes to paying these guys salaries, which I completely disagree with.
kojo87Mar 27th 2008 7:08AM
ironically i just finished submitting a document to Turnitin.com. i've never been accused of plagiarism by the site but i still think its bullshit that this company makes a killing assuming students and thieving little bastards who copy homework every chance they get.
like you said, scanning for plagiarism makes total sense. its the money and the "guilty until proven innocent" way of doing so that burns me. im sure there are plenty of students that flunked papers and in turn, classes because they forgot to cite something but thats the least of their worries.
JonathanMar 26th 2008 12:31PM
If you did not turn over all rights, then Turnitin would lose that legal protection - I think that was part of the judge's reasoning.
It's worth reading here: http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2008/03/clickthrough_ag.htm
If you don't like Turnitin, develop a model that doesn't violate student rights - say, by encouraging students to submit their papers to your services, and receiving a small fee if their paper is found to have been plagiarized. In addition, for each paper the student submits for comparison, they receive a chunk of profits at the end of the year in the form of license fee payments.
AndrewMar 27th 2008 7:08AM
If the students have a problem then maybe they should find a different University. There should be no assigning of ownership to the turnitin people at all.
I know my University faculty uses turnitin but I have yet to see anything the requires my transferral of copyright to the turnitin people.
AndyMar 27th 2008 11:17AM
When you submit to the sight you have to accept a long form that states that you surrender all intellectual property from what you're submitting to them. Thus rendering your paper and it's contents as their property to use in catching other plagiarists. It's part of the process in submitting the paper, and it shouldn't happen.
AndrewMar 28th 2008 7:41AM
AFAIK our University doesn't require us to submit our work to Turnitin. However they have noted that they are using their service. Trying to find out more information on how they are using it now.
Having to surrender your work is just plain wrong. Maybe giving them limited rights might be OK, but if you surrender ownership then you are screwed if you want to use your work commercially later on.
dpMar 27th 2008 7:08AM
Most universities have a code of conduct/ethics that include sections on plagiarism and other sorts of misconduct. They have historically monitored conduct using employees called 'teaching staff' or similar, but have recently semi-automated that process, in keeping with automation trends in wider society.
In agreeing to attend a particular university, students are subject to whatever monitoring that university uses. Ther's no need to consider copyright issues given that the monitor is an employee or contractor and has the inherent authority to analyse student's work.
Aside from that, students who are really concerned about intellectual property should be monitoring their own research supervisors!
JamesMar 28th 2008 1:31PM
"You agree that XXX shall be granted limited license to compare Your Work against others submitted for the sole purpose of finding derived works, in perpetuity": not slimy.
"You agree to surrender any and all rights You currently have over Your Work to XXX without remuneration, in perpetuity, neener neener": slimy.
You're saying the actual site's terms are closer to the second than the first? Ick.