Turnitin.com facing lawsuit

In My Humble Opinion
41

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
As for your papers not having made you a dime—if you think they’re worth something, you’re still free to try to get someone to pay you for them, so they can publish them in next year’s edition of Great Student Papers of the Year or wherever. If you expect someone to pay you for them so that they can turn them in in their own classes as their own work, though, you might have reason to be mad at turnitin.com for thwarting your plans.
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What about expecting someone to pay for the service of using the paper in a database in order to make sure no one else copies it? Does Spezza still have the chance to do that too?

42

[QUOTE=Cervaise]
Copyrighting one’s material is not something that one must “do.” Simply recording one’s words/thoughts/creative material of whatever nature in a fixed medium is sufficient to produce copyright. Now, one can register the copyright, to gain the benefit of additional protections. But in general, as soon as a student writes his or her paper, it’s copyrighted, without further action.
[/QUOTE]
I am aware of the general principle of copyright, but the linked article in the OP said

which suggests to me that they were specifically trying to nail down their rights in a manner to reduce challenges to their claims, leading me to suspect the possibility of a setup.

I agree that it is an issue of law that needs to be resolved, but I am still suspicious of their motives.

43

[QUOTE=Garfield226]
Same difference as you remembering that Metallica concert you went to last weekend, and recording it – not for dissemination, but rather to compare against other concerts you attend later.
[/QUOTE]

Not a good anology - Metallica used to allow bootleg recordings. Point made, though.

The posters pointing out that Turnitin is making money off the archives have a good argument. That sounds like it would throw Fair Use out the window.

44

[QUOTE=Garfield226]

Yes, I’m aware cheating existed before the internet. The statement was made that without turnitin, academic integrity would be out the window. So I’m wondering how, for example, scotandersn’s degree means squat, since the site likely didn’t exist when the degree was granted.
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I’m not a teacher, but the statistics I’ve seen on the number of people who think cheating is okay leads me to believe that academic integrity is already out the window. That’s obviously too broad a statement, let’s say instead it is not what it used to be. I just got something from IEEE about the increase in plagiarism, and a new policy on what authors and editors are to do when this is detected.

It’s just an arms race - as cheating becomes easier, more people will cheat, and the same technology is needed to catch them.

I’m not a lawyer, but accessing a protected work is different from copying it. The papers often talk about the number of Google hits for some term - are the intellectual property rights of the authors of the websites accessed for this violated? The article said that there was a do not archive request that was not followed, but if this is a normal request, I can’t see why there is going to be a lawsuit about a mistake. Something else must be going on.

Do you have any suggestions about how to compare paper A and paper B without accessing paper B?

BTW, I rather suspect they encode the characteristics of the papers in some way and compare them, and access the actual paper only if there is a hit. I doubt you could consider a checksum of a file a derivative work. The papers may not be getting accessed at all.

45

[QUOTE=Maus Magill]
Not a good anology - Metallica used to allow bootleg recordings. Point made, though.

The posters pointing out that Turnitin is making money off the archives have a good argument. That sounds like it would throw Fair Use out the window.
[/QUOTE]

Someone quoting a segment from a book in a review is also making money out of it. Fair use does not imply the user can not be paid.

46

[QUOTE=Voyager]
Someone quoting a segment from a book in a review is also making money out of it. Fair use does not imply the user can not be paid.
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I suspect that this sort of argument is what’s going to prove to be the crux of the issue.

47

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
I am aware of the general principle of copyright, but the linked article in the OP said which suggests to me that they were specifically trying to nail down their rights in a manner to reduce challenges to their claims, leading me to suspect the possibility of a setup.
[/QUOTE]

I’m not sure how this makes it a setup. You will be hard-pressed to find a plaintiff in any copyright case anywhere in the US who doesn’t register his copyright before filing suit.

48

I am working on my masters degree. I.Have.Never.Cheated.On.Anything. To me cheating is more stressful than doing the work. You have to worry about getting caught. We are told that our papers are going through TII. And we are told that if you stay in the class, you are consenting to this. It is a way to protect honest students. I had a disk disappear a long time ago in my undergrad and I am thrilled that the papers on that disk have archived. So when some dickwad tries to pass of my (hard) work as their own, they will get caught.

49

[QUOTE=Voyager]
I’m not a teacher, but the statistics I’ve seen on the number of people who think cheating is okay leads me to believe that academic integrity is already out the window. That’s obviously too broad a statement, let’s say instead it is not what it used to be.
[/QUOTE]

Or maybe it never was like we think it was. I sincerely doubt people have less academic integrity than people did a few decades ago.

[QUOTE=Voyager]
I just got something from IEEE about the increase in plagiarism, and a new policy on what authors and editors are to do when this is detected.
[/QUOTE]

How do you even prove such a thing? Please show me some proof that there is more plagiarism going on today. Maybe more people are getting caught, due to things like TII.com, but that does not mean more people do it.

50

Ridiculous. No one is going to make a profit off their homework. All they’re going to do is alter turnitin’s TOS, probably to strip them of the rights they may have had.

I love the article’s inherent assumption that for some reason being a straight-A student will glorify them, and that no straight-A student could possibly have become one without cheating.

51

[QUOTE=brickbacon]
Please show me some proof that there is more plagiarism going on today. Maybe more people are getting caught, due to things like TII.com, but that does not mean more people do it.
[/QUOTE]

I don’t know that more people are cheating today than had been the case in the past. However, I do believe that it’s factual to assert that it’s easier to cheat today than it had been in the past.

Back in the Dark Ages, before computers and word processors, I would never have considered copying a paper to claim as my own to turn it in: Trying to type out someone else’s words always drove me nuts, even when it was a simple sentence length quote. Trying to do that for a whole paper? I’d have given up halfway through, and decided it would be easier to just write my own paper.

That’s not a consideration anymore, when dealing with online sources and computers. Point, click, and paste makes stealing someone else’s words both easy and accurate for very little effort.

I think it’s reasonable to believe, in light of the reduction of the difficulty, that this kind of plagiarism has gone up. I can’t claim that I have proof, but the logic involved does seem compelling.

52

Well now, here’s a development…

I just received an e-mail from Turnitin.com on behalf of an instructor at the University of Central Oklahoma. That person has requested to see a copy of a paper a student submitted to me last January, as there seems to be a 2% match with something one of their students submitted.

The email contains the nature of the request, and the text of the submitted document. The student’s name is not included in the text (It could be because they forgot, or because Turnitin deliberately removed it, I have no idea). The email does not seem to have been copied to the student themselves.

Essentially Turnitin is asking my permission to forward a copy of the paper, even though I am not the author nor the copyright holder. When I mentioned this functionality (inaccurately, as it turns out) in my first post in this thread, I was not aware that this was how it worked.

Because our Turnitin subscription allows us to register only a certain number of students at a time, my online records of last year’s classes have been deleted, so I can’t find out which of my students authored this paper. I certainly don’t feel it is my place to forward a copy without this student’s permission, whoever it is, and even if I did feel otherwise, in my four year’s experience dealing with Turnitin, a 2% match is more often than not a matching URL in the referenced sources or some other such superficial information.

I plan to respond to the email out of professional courtesy, although I will delete the paper’s text that has been pasted in, and include an explanation why.

In looking for information regarding any court decisions about the copyright status of papers submitted as school assignments, I came across a blog post that linked to Turnitin’s statement about the legality of their operations, which I don’t think has been linked to yet, and might prove interesting reading for followers of this thread