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: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: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.