A group of four students have filed suit against Turnitin.com and its parent company for copyright infrigement.
I have some questions about the morality of what was done with the student’s papers, myself. (The paper submitted with the specific request/instruction “do not archive” that seems to have been archived anyways seems to me to be, at best, a mistake on Turnitin.com’s part.) It seems to me, however, that this quote from the article, describing one of the involved parents represents a bit of a “rose colored” view of the world: “Kevin Wade, that plaintiff’s father, said he thinks schools should focus on teaching students cheating is wrong.”
Maybe it’s just that I’ve got a jaundiced view of students, after seeing all the plagiarism threads here on the Dope, and talking to my sister - but it seems to me in this internet age, it’s been proven that a signifigant fraction of students will try to pass off internet papers as their own work, and no single teacher can be expected to run the kind of data search that replicating Turnitin.com’s service would require.
The more I think about it the more the implications seem even less clear-cut than they had at first blush.
Can the school claim that by submitting the work, the student has relinquished property rights, since without the school’s assignment the work would never have been written, i.e. it’s part of an implied contractual obligation for the student to provide work to be evaluated to earn the diploma at the end of the HS time?
What about the desire of the school to keep from creating a supply of non-archived papers? Does that have any legitimate bearing on this case?
Any other thoughts out there, from other, better informed or better educated, Dopers?
Interesting. I’d never considered what sort of copyright issues there might be for school homework. I’d agree that it’s an “understood thing”. Though I don’t think that a school should have the right to sell the kids’ work. But then I’m also not sure that I would want it to all be put into the public domain.
I would imagine that law has been created for universities governing copyright of student work, so probably whatever that is will be the precedent for this case.
I know that my senior thesis for college will eventually be put up publicly for access on their website, so in Japan at least, it seems like a college has at least that much right.
Hmm…if they don’t already, I think schools should make students sign a pact allowing the schools to use services like Turnitin.com for the purposes of detecting plaigarism only (and not to directly profit from it).
I don’t know the applicable law, but they certainly shouldn’t be able to. Assignments are written to fulfull requirements of the class, but the writing is still the student’s. If I wanted to try to publish the god-awful short stories I wrote in Junior English, I shouldn’t have to get permission from Mrs. Butler.
Good on the students for suing. I’d also want to fight against a requirement that I sign away my rights to my work. I’d happily agree to have the paper checked against whatever database they want (not like I can prevent that), but if Turnitin wants to profit off of my work, they can damned well pay me for the privilege of making a copy of my paper.
However, they are not objecting to the school submitting their papers to Turritin. They are objecting to Turritin archiving a copy of their papers. That does not seem to me to be an essential part of the school using Turritin, since Turritin could just compare the paper with its database, then not archive the paper.
I’m assuming, though, that the database consists of submitted papers, so with each additional submission, the database expands.
I remember when I was making any film in college that they held the copyright for the final work, even though I paid for the stock, processing, etc. through “lab fees”. It wouldn’t surprise me if many colleges have this policy (though it’s not something they generally make public) while it also wouldn’t surprise me if as many colleges assumed this right without ever codifying it into written policy.
The question is: Whom do the papers belong to? I say they belong to the school. If I write something for work, my writing belongs to the company. It’s not too much of a stretch to infer that if I were to write something for school, the work belongs to the school.
The database should contain:
(1) text from reference sources on the Web, such as Wiukipedia, which students might copy, and
(2) the papers that you can buy from commercial sources on the web.
No, because it’s not a “work for hire”: the students are not employed by the school. Dissertations submitted for higher degrees do not belong to the university: they belong to the student, who can go on to publish part of all of the dissertation as a research paper or journal article as their own copyright.
And this will prevent plagiarism via the purchase of papers from less formal vendors how, exactly? The cynic in me thinks these kids didn’t want their papers archived so they could sell them to other students next year.
As I understand it, you always hold the copyright to your own work unless you agree to a different arrangement. I’m sure you signed a contract agreeing your work belongs to the company (as did I), so that’s different. Unless a student (or parent) signs a contract saying the school holds the rights to his work, the school is not entitled to give their work away.
Come on now. I think the father has a point about kids being presumed guilty. If I were still in high school, I think I’d be very annoyed that the school was giving my papers away and presumping that I was cheating.
Unfortunately, one of the more effective ways to teach that a certain behavior is wrong and to be avoided is to demonstrate that engaging in the behavior tends to produce undesirable consequences.
It’s a genuine issue that I’m surprised hasn’t come up before.
My feeling is that Turnitin would be covered if they have wording that states copyright of the manuscript belongs to the person who wrote it and that the author is only authorizing TII to use the manuscript and not republish it. TII does not need to ask for the copyright – merely a license.
Here’s what they say:
So it looks like TII has researched the issue previously and has a lot of ammunition on their side.
As for the damages number, that’s wishful thinking. Did the authors register their copyright before uploading? If not, they have to pay their own court costs, and damages are limited to any actual loss (impossible to prove, especially for a high school paper) and requiring TII to remove the documents.
Assuming they did register it, it seems pretty damn unlikely that any court is going to give them $150K for each.
And there’s also plenty of precedent for web archiving documents you don’t have copyright to. Look at Google; look at archive.org. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google joined in the defense.
I’d be very surprised if the students got any appreciable money from the lawsuit.
Agreed. My Masters thesis had to include a prefatory page which spelt out in prescribed paragraphs that the copyright of the text resides with me, but also that the intellectual property rights of anything described in the text belong to the university. So if I’d invented a cure for cancer, the university would make the money from it, although I’d be free to publish how it’s done. (Not a great consideration when dealing with a discussion of medieval mass settings…)
My understanding is that the reason turnitin.com wants to archive the papers is strictly to be able to catch future students who try to plagiarize or copy from them. If I were an honest student worried about my intellectual property, I’d be all for that! (Unless I suspected that turnitin.com couldn’t be trusted to use it only for that purpose. Something like crazyjoe’s suggestion might be helpful.)
I’d say colleges could (and probably will, if the suit goes anywhere), require releases from students as a condition of taking a class. Note that you can allow someone rights to reproduce your work without relinquishing your own rights to it, so people could still publish their fiction or whatever.
What intrigues me is the high school issue. Not only are the students not reimbursed for their time by the school, as in an employee relationship, but the state is forcing them to attend and produce work. I think that puts a major crimp in the analogy.
I also dislike the “presumed guilty” atmosphere of this practice, so when you add in a private company profiting from others’ work, I’d be happy to see it go down in flames.
And you wouldn’t have to. Rights can be transferred in whole or in part, with whatever limitations are deemed appropriate. When I click Submit Reply and publish this post, for example, I grant the Chicago Reader the right to distribute or re-publish these words in whatever form they wish, in perpetuity, but I also retain like rights for myself. If I wanted, I could gather every single one of my posts and publish a book (title: Wisdom and Drivel). There’s no reason the schools couldn’t operate under a similar arrangement: “By submitting your paper, you grant us the limited right to copy, distribute, archive, and publish your material at our discretion, without effect on your own rights to do same,” or some such.
Where do you see “presumed guilty” here? A cop aiming a radar gun at a car is not presuming the driver guilty of anything. I think the driver must be warned (by signs) but I assume that the teacher here discussed the process ahead of time.
There is even less presumed guilty in archiving the paper. A paper can be stolen from a teacher, or from a student, and reused without permission. Archiving a paper can help protect a student’s rights.
To those who have used this: what happens when there is a hit with respect to the paper in the archive? Is that reported to the person submitting the paper originally, or is the new paper which matches only reported?
The following year, you would give it to your frat brother, who was taking the same course, and have him change the title page. Or you would sell it to the fraternity, after spreading it around that you got an A on the paper last year, and it’s not archived at turnitin.
I remember when I went to school, I had to take a crit theory class, and write a big final paper for it. The teacher said, “If you want it back, you’ll have to submit two copies.” He checked them for plagiarism in the analog fashion (this was early 90s), by writing a quick abstract, and sorting them according to critical approach, essays cited, etc. If they could do that then, why can’t they use turnitin now?