Students Protest Turnitin.com

StupidSexyFlanders writes "The Washington Post ran a story about students protesting their school's use of anti-plagiarism site Turnitin.com, which checks papers they've written against a database of 22 million other papers. From the article: "Members of the new Committee for Students' Rights said they do not cheat or condone cheating. But they object to Turnitin's automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights." Statistically speaking, 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?"

Comments

Re:Well

[CheshireCatCO]

Actually, a lot of cheating comes from paper mills and using old papers (yours or others'), not Wikipedia. (He says, having taught that the college level recently.) So keeping the papers is a very smart thing to do. I think that legally, TurnItIn.com and other such sites are probably OK in doing that as long as the papers are not accessible except by their comparisons to new submissions *and* they take good steps to make sure that the database isn't cracked. In many ways, it's akin to the difference between the Census Bureau publishing aggregate statistics that include you in them (even very personal data, like sex-related information) and actually publishing your census form.

Re:IP rights are the least of it

[Garse Janacek]

That depends on what you're going for -- we used a similar system (maybe it was that exact site, can't remember) when I did some grading in college. A 27% match we would have completely ignored -- that's the kind of correlation you can get from all kinds of reasons, depending on the assignment and on what other assignments are out there. We'd only check out matches like 98%, 99%, on which it's almost impossible to get a "false positive"...

Re:Well

[shaitand]

"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)."

Just to nit-pick use does not fall within the realm of copyright. The me, you, the janitor, and Barbara Bush can all read these papers without violating copyright. What we can not do is make copies of the papers.

self-plagarism

[LordEd]

My former college has rules against self-plagarism:

Self-plagiarism is the submission of work that is the same or substantially the same as work prepared or performed by the student for credit in another course (except in instances where the instructor receiving the work has given prior permission). Work includes but is not limited to essays, term papers, projects, and assignments. Although self-plagiarism may not involve the intellectual theft that characterizes plagiarism (as defined in Definition-1 above), it is a form of academic misconduct and is subject to the same disciplinary actions as plagiarism. All Procedures for the Plagiarism Policy as outlined below will apply to this Policy.

The school owns it anyway

[feronti]

Apparently, none of these students have read the IP policy at their school. At least at my University, anything you turn in for a grade becomes the property of the University. By turning it in, you have implicitly waived your intellectual property rights over it anyway. Granted, I don't think that's fair in the first place, but the simple fact is that many of the students don't have any rights to the papers to begin with.

Re:The school owns it anyway -- NOT!

[whoever57]

At least at my University, anything you turn in for a grade becomes the property of the University.

I don't thik this is possible. Copyright laws have strict requirement over what constitutes a copyright transfer and it requires a specific conveyance of the copyrights. So, an agreement made at the beginning of your studies can't possibly convey something that does not exist, nor can a policy possibly be construed as an instrument of conveyance.

What might be possible is that you grant a license to the university that allows the university to do whatever it likes with your papers, but you still own the copyright.

Check out section 204 of the copuright code

Probably the university owns the physical copy of the paper that you turned in, but not the underlying copyrights.

Re:my school

[Cadallin]

Riiiight. So when 500 or more assignments (per semester!) get made for: write a 2-3 page paper, using these sources, on x topic thats been written about to death; none of them are going to be similar? My ass they aren't. This is a point that I think is legimate, especially given the similarities in English education throughout regions, let alone states and counties. I can't even conceive of how the sheer volume of papers written on the same topic can FAIL to produce remarkably similar papers (assuming standard rules of grammar are even remotely followed, and let's face it, even mistakes are fairly standard by regional dialect, as well as those imposed by normal composition techniques, i.e. typing errors.) Given the lack of curricula changes at most institutions I can see how thousands upon thousands of papers of the same length, on the same topic, written by people with fairly similar educational backgrounds are going to be written within a span of just a few years. Even worse you're talking about people who have read the same resources in preparation for writing these papers. If that's not a system designed to produce identical papers, I don't know what is!

It's just like music composition. People with similar music education backgrounds end up producing similar music. That's just how it is. Are you seriously going to argue that the standard educational texts HAVEN'T been mined for every bloody original idea they contain a thousand times over?