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Self-plagiarism is not up to Turnitin to make decisions on; my employer doesn't allow it (and while I think I know why, am not confident enough to comment publicly), others may not. Turnitin merely flags such sections as such, and it's then up to the institution to make a call on it. They have their own page on the matter, which summarises effectively: https://turnitin.com/static/helpCenter/self_plagiarism.php

Amazon needs to run submitted eBooks through TurnItIn to check for plagiarism. Otherwise, they're involved in copyright infringement for profit, which is a felony in the US.

First off, great post.

Secondly, I wonder what the CEO's thoughts are on services like Turnitin?

How much you wanna bet he thinks they're unethical, too?

plagarism checker databases like turnitin lack the ability to parse anything but word files

I didn't believe this statement so I looked it up.
According to their student guide at http://www.turnitin.com/resources/documentation/turnitin/training/en_us/qs_student_en_us.pdf

At the top of page 2:
" We accept submissions in these formats: MS Word, WordPerfect, RTF, PDF, PostScript, HTML, and plain text (.txt)"

So while I think plagiarism checkers are kind of a waste of resources, your statement is still false.

At least when people willingly store something on the cloud, it's their choice.

I was shocked to find out that my school required children to transmit and archive high school academic papers on to servers with known security issues.

Getting other parents to understand the stupidity was a real challenge.

"Your school is forcing your child to transmit (in an unsecure fashion) and store their private school work PERMANENTLY to a service that will archive it, and has fundamental security issues. Forever. With terms that say that the company licensed to use your paper for their business purposes (i.e. sell it). And you don't see an issue with that?"

My stance: If the principal and teachers are willing to upload their high school papers onto these servers with security issues for all to see, then I'll consider letting my child make their own choice in the matter.

Copyright doesn't grant a universal right to control a creative work. Keep in mind that the purpose of copyright is to *encourage* more creative works, not less; in doing so, copyright law will grant certain limited rights of control to the copyright owner in order to encourage more work.

The famous "fair use" test provides an exemption to copyright law, and depends upon the famous four point test. Basically, courts can consider four issues in determining whether or not use of other works without permission is allowable:

1. The purpose and character of the use of the work. If the use of the work creates something "new" rather than just providing a copy, the use is more likely to be allowable. Educational use is also more allowable than commercial use, but this isn't an absolute trump card.
2. The nature of the work being copied. You can't copyright facts or ideas, only expressions thereof.
3. The amount and substantiality of the work being copied. In general, the less you copy, the better; even then, though, what you copy matters. (The last minute of Citizen Kane is a little more key to understanding the movie than, say, a random minute from the middle of the movie.)
4. The effect of the use upon the value of the work. Does the copy provide enough of a substitute that people would be less likely to buy the original? If so, the copy is less likely to be allowable. This doesn't affect criticism, however ... a negative review of a book or movie might have an impact on its sales, but that doesn't make quoting the book or movie a violation of fair use

Now, this isn't an all-or-nothing or add-up-the-points analysis. Courts take all matters into consideration.

In the actual decision, the court ruled:

1. The plagiarism detector was definitely a "new work" created from the old works, and therefore was likely to be permissable.
2. The nature of the work was not a factor in the decision, either way.
3. The amount of the work was not a factor in the decision; while whole works were used, they were only used in limited ways (i.e. to compare for plagiarism).
4. The use of the papers did not affect the market value of the works, therefore favoring the use.

On the whole, then, the tool was deemed to be fair use.

The publisher should have used TurnItIn.

To those who are saying it's nearly impossible to phrase an original thought I totally agree. To those saying the phrasing is always, I beg to differ. Think of all the quotes from movies or quotes attributed to guys like Mark Twain or another famous person. Don't you all know someone (or several) who manage to botch those quotes all the time? I know I've managed to come up with 12 different ways to say lines from my favorite movies.

For my graduate class in Information Systems Security, I had to write a 20+ page paper in conjunction with the final. Each year my professor runs each paper through a program he wrote that compares each word, sentence, and paragraph from that years papers as well as every other paper he has ever collected. This is in addition to using http://turnitin.com/. He said a normal paper with excerpts and such typically runs between 10 and 15%. He doesn't start hardcore examining them until they hit about 20%. My paper had a 2% hit rate, which was the lowest he'd seen in awhile. I'm not a phenomenal writer, but I hate repetitive phrasing and similar constructions. It was mostly just a lot of editing and correcting, but it can definitely be done.

I disagree. TurnItIns work derived of the students is not identifiable as the students work itself. Not even remotely, as the work TurnItIn provides is a totally different one than the student did.

In what way is it not a database of works?

Perhaps you missed their features list, including:

• Side-By-Side Comparison
• Over 70 Million Student Papers
• Over 10 Billion Web Pages Crawled & Archived

Turntin is essentially a database like google. But unlike google, their database contains complete copies, and the ability to see, download, and print full copies of anything in the database that contain any similarity to an item at hand!

Highlighting similarities is not a significant modification to a work.

A translation of a work from French to English is a derived work. Highlighting changes much less.

I didn't say the teacher couldn't obtain a copy. That's your own straw man.

From Turnitin website:

"Our system doesnâ(TM)t deliver guilty verdicts for students. Instead, it generates Originality Reports that provide extensive documentation of any text matches from our databases. Trained faculty then make the determination if plagiarism has occurred."

http://www.turnitin.com/static/pdf/datasheet_cycle.pdf

So Turnitin could say the paper matched verbatim another given paper or perhaps 75% of another paper, then the instructor could make a decision on that alone and confront the student.

Your License to Us: Unless otherwise indicated in this Site, including our Privacy Policy or in connection with one of our services, any communications or material of any kind that you e-mail, post, or transmit through the Site (excluding personally identifiable information of students and any papers submitted to the Site), including, questions, comments, suggestions, and other data and information (your "Communications") will be treated as non-confidential and non-proprietary. You grant iParadigms a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, irrevocable license to reproduce, transmit, display, disclose, and otherwise use your Communications on the Site or elsewhere for our business purposes. We are free to use any ideas, concepts, techniques, know-how in your Communications for any purpose, including, but not limited to, the development and use of products and services based on the Communications.

There is an excellent legal analysis in another paper at turnitin site: http://turnitin.com/static/pdf/us_Legal_Document.p df . They indeed are relying on Fair Use doctrine...

So? Here's turnitin's EULA: http://turnitin.com/static/pdf/Usage_Policy.pdf. It explicitly excludes submitted papers from the transfer of ownership requirement.

Turnitin's EULA really does say: "ALL YOUR COMMUNICATIONS ARE BELONG TO US", but it adds: "excluding any papers submitted"... Look for yourself: http://turnitin.com/static/pdf/Usage_Policy.pdf . Sigh. It's so easy to check, nobody is checking, everyone is talking...

Going though their terms of use, it would seem they do not try to claim copyright (which is surprising, as many others try to landgrab user copyright). This really could land them in hot water, as they then don't even have a contract to rest on. Does anyone have their clickthrough for students? I am curious what the legal ramifications of being used in a public school are, as it would be a legally enforced (you have to go to school) theft of copyright. I am also curious what their storage was like, as if they didn't respect a request not to archive a paper they are in hotter water then if they never asked. It would be interesting to have tried sending DMCA notices, as this would force them into a even more sticky situation.

I didn't want that god damn bot spidering me anymore so I went to the URL they offer during the crawl: http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html

Right there it tells you how to turn the fucking thing off.

User-agent: TurnitinBot
Disallow: /

One of the McLean High plaintiffs wrote a paper titled "What Lies Beyond the Horizon." It was submitted to Turnitin with instructions that it not be archived, but it was, the lawsuit says.

So, instead of suing first, I assume that these students sent a certified letter demanding the content be removed from the database? The article doesn't specifically say, but I have a feeling that's not what happened.

Anyone else ever had their site visited by the Turnitin bot?

And the article mentioned Copyscape, which is more aimed at finding dupes of web pages (you enter a website, and it looks for similar pages in their index).

Hit your students with this one:
The terms of use for the "anti-plagerism" site turnitin.com (used by many colleges and universities) allows the company to retain the use of any IP included in the papers submited to it. Since students are almost never giving the chance to opt-out of using the site they are, in fact, being forced to give away their IP rights over their work free of charge.
I'm a college librarian and I hate this but it is popular with those faculty too lazy to craft assignments that are less prone to plagerism.

Commander Taco argues rhetorically, "it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?" Papers are often available on the Internet as PDFs expressly for the public--academic or not--to download. It is legitimate under fair use and academic fair use to "download," which strictly speaking could be as simple as hitting a web page, material and use it in papers as long as you cite sources properly. This is not the same thing as uploading someone's intellectual property to a site without the author's permission, without any compensation to the author, and for use other than the author's intent.

Plagiarism is a problem. I recall one of my professors saying she busts someone every quarter. It is not cool. The minimum penalty is an "F" for the class and expulsion is possible or, depending on the school, probable.

But Commander Taco might be talking about peer-to-peer file sharing of music, and thereby accusing all students who protest the use of turnitin.com of stealing copyrighted music. He paints with a broad brush.

The United States government has established rough guidelines for determining the nature and amount of work that may be "borrowed" without explicit written consent. These are called "fair use" laws, because they try to establish whether certain uses of original material are reasonable. The laws themselves are vague and complicated. Below we have condensed them into some rubrics you can apply to help determine the fairness of any given usage.

• The nature of your use.

  If you have merely copied something, it is unlikely to be considered fair use. But if the material has been transformed in an original way through interpretation, analysis, etc., it is more likely to be considered "fair use."

• The amount you've used.

  The more you've "borrowed," the less likely it is to be considered fair use. What percentage of your work is "borrowed" material? What percentage of the original did you use? The lower the better.

• The effect of your use on the original

  If you are creating a work that competes with the original in its own market, and may do the original author economic harm, any substantial borrowing is unlikely to be considered fair use. The more the content of your work or its target audience differs from that of the original, the better.

A better reference on Fair Use is available from Stanford University.

If a student submits a work for evaluation and archival, or clearly agrees to the archival of a work, there is no issue [with Archiving a Submitted Work for Later Reference].

Thus, it looks like you are right and I am wrong. Incidentally, if use of the students' papers is indeed fair use, as Turnitin asserts, then the high school students would seem to have little recourse.

"You grant iParadigms a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, irrevocable license to reproduce, transmit, display, disclose, and otherwise use your Communications on the Site or elsewhere for our business purposes."

IANAL, but I would expect most courts to honor the site's terms of usage over the copyright notice you post in your file, just as no court would force this site to remove my comment if I wrote "User does not grant permission to display this information on slashdot" in the comments I submitted here.

If, on the other hand, it is your school submitting the work, not you, you would have cause for legal action. Turnitin would be in the clear, though, because they would simply remove the content and force the school to indemnify them. Again the terms of use:

"Indemnification: You agree to indemnify and defend iParadigms from any claim (including attorneys fees and costs) arising from your (a) use of the Site, (b) violation of any third party right, or (c) breach of any of these Terms and Conditions.

I believe that turnitin.com is using thier site to provide a peer to peer resource for papers and making a profit doing it.

From turnitin.com http://www.turnitin.com/paperPermission.asp

Because submitted papers remain the intellectual property of their
authors, instructors, and respective institutions, we are unable to
show you the content of this paper at this time.

If you would still like to view this paper, your instructor may be
able to request permission to view the paper from the instructor to
whom the paper was originally submitted.


As as student I have major issues with knowing that all a person has to do is receive permission from my instructor to receive a full original copy of my work, and turnitin.com makes money off of this service.

I have written several research papers on research that I have done on my own and find it sickening that others have access to my research work without my express consent.

I personally can't wait until a coding flaw on their website allows Google to crawl all of the papers ever submitted and everyone sees the true problem with keeping works that don't belong to you on the Internet.

If turnitin.com would like to change their policy to only scan and compare received works to copyrighted works and keep no copy of my original work I would support them. But the fact that it is my intellectual property gives me the right to choose who can and cannot use it for any reason. If I choose to sell my work to someone else that is my choice, just as it is to restrict anyone from using my work to make a profit.

I intend to test turnitin.com by submitting one of my already submitted works to their service and see what results I receive. I'm curious to find out if I am able to see any of my work, or am able to successfully obtain access to my work through the instructor posed as another instructor or student. Wouldn't it be interesting to find out that turnitin.com provides access to intellectual property without consent of the writer for a price?

Just a couple of cents

They speak to copyright here.

Because no one dares to post the link to Turnitin.

You could have at least checked the home page of turnitin.com before making an unfounded (and wrong) assumption.

You wrote:

we're talking high school level papers here

However:
(from the turnitin home page

Success Stories

University of Colorado

Strengthening Honor Codes

University of Colorado Success StoryPlagiarism was a serious problem at the University of Colorado, despite an academic ...

You can easily make a fair use argument, it's being used purely for educational, non-profit purposes. And let's be honest, none of these students is actually producing anything that's inherently valuable, we're talking high school level papers here. Their proprietary attitude towards the utterly useless things they're writing is kind of amusing.

You also said:

You can easily make a fair use argument, it's being used purely for educational, non-profit purposes.

turnitin is not an educational institution, nor is it a non-profit. They do not have the same right to "fair use" vis educational institutions that the schools do. In fact, they have less right to look at these papers than the school janitor (at least he or she could claim they were reading it to make sure it wasn't something that was accidently tossed in the recycling bin).

Fair use by educational institutions is very specific. For example, for live performances of plays, one of the restrictions is that it has to be on school grounds.

Why do I find it ironic that both sites the author of this piece noted as being used by the schools to help catch cheaters, Turnitin and iThenticate appear to be copies of one another?

H.

Hey, I'm still wondering why an ex-Vietnam field medic is worried about making an endoscope. Oh, he's a doctor you say, not a veteran of the Vietnam war?

Maybe next time the submitter can change more than one word of the stories title. ("DIY" became "Homemade"). From now on can we put stories through TurnItIn?

• Turn It In
• Penny Arcade

Ah cheating how it has evolved.
I remember reading awhile ago when a middle school student changed his grade by creating I believe a macro that increased his grade by 10% by every time the class grades were pulled up. Eventually he was caught when he had a percentage far above 100.

another cheating example that comes to mind. Is when a professor decided to check how many papers turned in were plagiarized with http://www.turnitin.com/ and found that a sizable number of students were cheating.

As a university student at a large university, I have noticed that some classes prevent cheating more than others. For example, in my chem class which has over a thousand students four forms are given, empty seats all around you. It is nearly impossible to cheat. My physics class I am taken now there are 2 forms and students are placed directly next to each other. Needless to say after the second midterm a student went from a perfect score to only one out of fifteen correct. But when classes only have 3 exams that make your exam cheating must be delt with extremely harshly. These mild security flaws with technology that keep appearing are usually due to weak passwords anyways. This case a social security number was the lone culprit. I think a levelheaded IT department and some well planned passwords and password recovery processes are what should be focused on now. I feel that cheating is a most urgent program in colleges

The URL in question is http://adwords.google.co.uk/support/bin/answer.py? answer=9653&topic=65, which is not suppressed by the robots.txt file. The cached version simply shows that Google stuffed keywords for their own search engine, not that they intend for other search engines to index the tweaked pages.

I'd be interested to see what other search engine user agents return, like if I tried msnbot or Nutch or TurnitinBot. Has anyone found nefarious use of these tags in other search engines? Also has anyone found these for the .com site versus the .co.uk site?

This is not the first time when Google (and search engines in general) changed how we do things.

Nowadays copyrighters use Google to search for potential violations of their intelectual property. Plagiarism is easy to detect nowadays thanks to Google as well. Instead of using rather expensive systems in order to search for duplicate work, teachers are now one search away in distinguishing original work from the rest.

http://www.turnitin.com/

At the uni i go to, they have started testing out Turn-it-in (http://www.turnitin.com/). It can be used in all faculties for code, mathematics, and 'normal' written assignments. Checks all submitted assigments against each other and the web, highlights the similarities and gives a report.

The good thing about it is that it is not just to catch cheats, but to educate students (particularly in the sciences) about referencing quotes etc, and to not just block copy other peoples work. Courses will either have the students submit to Turn-it-in and see the reports before they actually submit and fix it if necessary (at least one dumbass submitted his copied assignment anyway!), or markers can submit bits they think are suspicious.

Or not so much...you can judge for yourself based on turnitin.com's http://www.turnitin.com/static/legal/legal_documen t.html/ legal information page, in which they more or less address compliance with FERPA, COPPA and copyright law.

There is another aspect to that, of course. One of my professors, Scott Nicholson, discussed the problem on CNN. I thought there was something about it on the website, but I couldn't find it in a quick look this morning. Anyway, he did a small piece discussing how little of a phrase one actually needed to find matches on the web. Four or five words is often enough.

He took a poll in one of my classes about turnitin.com and other sites. The students were overwhelmingly against it. Not because we're cheaters, but because we agree with the McGill student who fought the system. Many of us, oddly enough, consider turning in papers to a service who will keep it on file a copyright violation.

Dr. Nicholson's solution, and that of many others in our school is to use stepped assignments. If there is a large paper due at some point in the semester, we have to submit paper proposals by a given date. For some, we need to have outlines or a short presentation for the class at a later date. Most professors will allow students to submit papers for critique in advance of the due date. All of this is to not only make it more difficult for someone to buy or obtain a paper from somewhere, but also to help the students plan and work on the assignment over the semester rather than putting it off until the last minute.

And then, if necessary, there's always the Google trick.

All work submitted to Turnitin is checked against three databases of content:
[...]
3. Millions of student papers already submitted to Turnitin.

So the teachers commit copyright infringement by submitting their students' works to turnitin and turnitin commits grand scale copyright infringement by copying, preserving and capitalising on "millions of student papers" without the students' permission. Great business!

In the case of this kid, I think it's pretty cut-and-dry that he should bite the bullet. If you get caught plagiarizing, then you get busted. The fact that he didn't get caught before isn't evidence of negligence or discrimination, but rather his own luck in previous instances.

When I submitted the story today, I had hoped to generate a debate about the rights-and-wrongs of plagiarism, but also about the issue of whether or not universities should be requiring the usage of online plagiarism-checking services.

I'm pretty torn about online plagiarism-checking services. I think plagiarism is bad. I mean...every style book has a reasonable method of documenting where you got a quote from, and you can quote a whole paragraph in if it's relevant. For that matter, for most university papers, you can paraphrase a paragraph as long as you (a) cite the original source after you do so and (b) provide some more analysis to suppliment the material you used.

On the flip side, I do feel a bit violated when I have to submit these papers. One at least one site, the user agreement you MUST agree to states that the site basically inherits ownership of the paper. Now, that really bothers me. I post all of my academic papers (as well as personal poetry and other writings) on my own personal website. Based upon those user agreements, this site could post my paper, with our without indication that I authored it, or even sell it, without even informing me. Worse, if a professor requires that I use the service, I don't have a choice in the matter. I am forced to either (a) take a failing grade on the paper (and potentially the class), or (b) give up what intellectual property rights I have over my paper. That really irks me.

I don't have anything to hide; I don't rip off other people's work for my papers. At the same time though, I know other students DO rip off other authors' writings. I don't think it should be a professor's responsibility to be a source checker. If a fifty page paper has forty to eighty sources, the professor shouldn't have the responsibility to hunt down all of those sources. At the same time though, schools are putting their students in an academic guilty-until-proven-innocent situation.

If it doesn't already, I would expect a service like this will eventually include plagiarism detection, due to marketing pressure if nothing else. This is something that human graders do, at least over the space of papers they grade and works they remember.

But if plagiarism detection is added, then the grading service would have to make and retain some encoding of each graded paper, a derivative work, in its database.

Once that happens, the grading service also becomes subject to all of the issues already raised with services like TurnItIn.com, already discussed here.

I also found this comment from ETS's site rather strange, to say the least:

It is important to remember that e-rater is an embedded real-time application; it is not software.

My father is a college professor and he frequently complains about the problems he faces trying to prevent his students from downloading a term paper and handing it in.

Tell your father to get his school to subscribe to this

It automatically checks papers and compares them with papers available for sale on the internet.

If anything, the internet has made it easier to detect plaigerism.

Use of a work for non-profit educational purposes is presumptively fair, under most circumstances. 17 U.S.C. 107. However, although the overall purpose of creating a database of student works is to increase the efficacy of the TURNITIN plagiarism detection system, the system is provided to institutions on a for-profit basis, and is therefore commercial in nature.

Commercial use of a work may still be "fair use" under U.S. Copyright Law (17 U.S.C. 107), especially when less than the entire work is being used, and/or the use does not "materially impair the marketability of the work which is copied." Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enters., 471 U.S. 539, 566-67 (1985). Here, the actual work is used by the TURNITIN system only as a reference, for purposes of creating a separate work, the digital "fingerprint". If there is a match between a submitted work and fingerprinted portions of an archived student work, only that matching text is highlighted in the originality report.

The identification of a textual match between documents relays a fact, which is not protected from disclosure by the Copyright laws. 17 U.S.C. 102(b). Where there is no way to express the fact in question except by copying of the underlying material, the fact and the portion of the material representing it are said to have "merged", excluding the material itself from the ambit of copyright protection. Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co., 499 U.S. 340, 349 (1991); Harper & Row Publishers, supra at 556; Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress Int'l, Inc., 293 F.3d 791 (9th Cir., June 7, 2002). Because one cannot identify a passage as having been copied without matching it to the material that was putatively copied from, display of the matching material is not prohibited by copyright.

No other portions of the archived work are displayed, used, published, distributed or further copied without prior author consent. Compare, A&M Records, et al. v. Napster, at 1015 and 1019 (distribution of a copied work to the public without the copyright holder's consent implies that the copyright in the copied material may have been infringed). As such, the archival does not publish the work as a whole, or otherwise impinge on the author's ability to exploit the work commercially. Because the "primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors but '[to] promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts" (Veeck, supra as reported at 2002 U.S. App.LEXIS 10963, *25), the minimal use of a student's work to ferret out plagiarism in others works, without making the work itself available to the public, is a fair use that does not infringe any copyright which may be present in the archived work.

turnitin has a pretty interesting analysis of whether they infringe on the copyright of the student who submit the papers.

I goto Florida State, and here the school recently purchased a subscription to www.turnitin.com
Teachers are now requiring students to turn in a digital copy of their paper, that will be uploaded to that website and searched for plagerism.

I sure am glad I got those writing classes out of the way early-before the professors used that website.
Whats next, a online submission that will grade you paper too?

correct

But .. you're allowed to cite from books that you read in the library. The plagiarism services use far more complex algorithms to detect patterns. Atleast thats what they would like us to think.

This raises an interesting question. turnitin claims to detect plagiarism in essays turned in by students. But those essays are then stored by turnitin in order to detect future plagiarism (of course since we can't track the use of the essay, I have wondered if turnitin isn't feeding the essays out to one of the essay sales sites). If the essay is copyright by the author, this seems to me to be out of the realm of fair use. Perhaps a few students should go after turnitin in the courts.

But do they use it for anything besides physics? In the IT Department they use turnitin.com to combat plagiarism. Students submit both program code and papers there. (Along with usually submitting them to a first-class folder).

TurnItIn.com. I don't think it works very well, because, IIRC, it doesn't check paper sources, just online sources. That would work pretty well in this application though.

If somebody lifts the plot of a Clancey book, and then rewrites it with different character names and different names for the setting, that's plagiarism. Now for the hard part: Prove it.

It's not hard at all. Give this a try.