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

Well

[Sv-Manowar]

I can see those students having a problem with that, after all it is your work and you don't really want others to keep hold of it while checking. It's like turning up to an airport, handing your mobile over for them to check it wasn't dangerous, and then them handing it back to you after copying your phone book and all of your messages off of it. The company should check it against the database, and then get rid of it, their database shouldn't be automatically updating with every paper that goes through it because eventually it will start catching out genuine work purely due to the amount of data that is being processed through it.

I think the problem here is that the company is permenantly keeping it, and I'd be pretty smarted about that as well, but then on the flip side of the coin for the company and the school, the more copies they have, the more likely (in their view) it is that they will catch those who for example, are using their older brothers essays to go through or using work taken from old pupils. It's a tough situation to gauge, but the students have a strong point on the IP there. That being said, why not just add Wikipedia to the database and catch 99.9% of students, heh. Juding from teachers I know, Wikipedia is the bane of their existance when it comes to schoolwork.

Re:Well

[kfg]

I think the problem here is that the company is permenantly keeping it, and I'd be pretty smarted about that as well, but then on the flip side of the coin for the company and the school, the more copies they have, the more likely (in their view) it is that they will catch those who for example, are using their older brothers essays to go through or using work taken from old pupils.

Well yes, that's just the point. Without retaining the papers their database of papers would be empty. What good would FDDB be if they automatically purged every entry?

KFG

Re:Well

[MoneyT]

The problem is, the students are not employed. They recieve no compensation for their work.

Re:Well

[Waffle Iron]

Try your line of argument the next time you deal with a wedding photographer and see how far it gets you.

Re:Well

[Dun Malg]

The papers are written on request by the teacher/school. It's a lot like a "work for hire", which would be owned by the teacher/school,

That is not the case. By law, copyright belongs to the author unless other arrangements have been specifically made. "Work for hire" happens only in the context of an employment contract. I would love to see what sort of "contract" you think students (or their parents) signed for the school to retain copyright of students' work. If a student writes a really intriguing short story for an English class assignment, does the school get to sell it to an anthology compiler or a Hollywood script writer? Not a chance. They can't even print it in the school newspaper without the student's permission. How is giving copies to Turnitin any different?

Re:Well

[Karl Cocknozzle]

i think we'll find that the argument will show that the school owns that copyright, just as a company you work for owns the copyright to any code you produce for them (and in some situations, code you produce for yourself).

You're comparing apples and zebras, my friend.

In a professional setting, a "work for hire" is what you're talking about... You're being paid to code for XYZ Corporation, therefore whatever work you produce for them on their time, they own copyright to. You refer to occasions where your employer might own YOUR code too, but that is legally gray, and generally based on how restrictive an employment contract/non-compete agreement you sign. Unless you sign that, your code is your code, as long as you produced it on your own time.

Compare this with a University setting. You are paying them, not the other way around. Clearly not a work-for-hire situation. You are producing written (or coded) works for your own personal development and education. The professor MAY have the right to compare your document to a database to see if you're cheating or not, but I can't see any legitimate situation where some third-party would have the right to store and use that document. You haven't signed any contract giving the university or your professor copyright over your work, so that wouldn't seem to apply either.

This is different, of course, if you're working in some sort of grad. assistant or research role to produce work for somebody else. In THAT circumstance, work-for-hire might apply to things you actually write "for-hire." But it certainly wouldn't give your employer blanket control of everything you produce while employed there.

Re:Well

[Mitsoid]

Teachers shouldn't eruse the exact same project every year... i've taken a photography class with the same instructor 3 semesters now, just for fun.. Every year he recycles about half the previous year's good ideas, rewords the projects in such a way we can't reuse the photos... and adds a few new ideas to the table... Best instructor i've ever had, fun, puts some effort himself into the class, and makes it rather enjoyable

Re:Well

[ShimmyShimmy]

"the collective Slashdot response it just suck it up and deal with it, not to be so greedy, and an admonishment that information wants to be free."

Yes, this is the general response, and I personally would say the same. But I think there are two key issues here that really differentiate this comparison.

#1: When artists release songs/videos/movies, they are very conspicuously distributing them to a very large audience, of their own free will. When musicians release a song, they do that because they created a (presumably) great work of art, and they want the world to hear it (and also hopefully make some money off of it). I have several friends in bands, and when I ask them what got them into their music, they never reply "because I want to make a profit". They want the world to enjoy their music; I don't want the world to enjoy the paper I just wrote for my class. I do not want to distribute that paper. I wrote it probably because I had to, and I want to turn it in to the professor/TA and get it back.

#2: When people pirate music, they probably do it because they enjoy it (but don't want to pay for it). If I just wrote a song, and a million punk kids download it for free, at least they are doing so BECAUSE THEY WANT TO LISTEN TO MY SONG. Sure, I will be pissed that they undermined my work by not buying it. But not very pissed. At least they appreciate my art. Turnitin? They are not illegally making a copy of my paper because they want to read it, or enjoy it, or exercise the social value of it. They are taking it for the specific purpose of getting other students in trouble.

Perhaps if lucky, a couple slashdotters will open their eyes to IP and realize that they are not liberating the world by using bittorrent and kazaa, but this is clearly a different issue. At least Kazaa and similar are redistributing the artwork with the intent of end-user consumption. Turnitin is just a gigantic slap in the face to every author and artist in the world.

Quality, not quantity

[LaughingCoder]

I think they should only submit (and hence keep) the papers that got a B or better. After all, if kids are dumb enough to plagarize C (or worse) papers, let them.

Groups can properly contradict themselves

[localman]

Keep in mind that a large group, like a student committee or slashdot, the group can be vocal oppontents and vocal proponents of intellectual property in different cases without any individual actually contradicting themselves. But taking that into account, I'll be there are still a huge number of copyright violators who would be outraged if their own copyright was violated. I find that kind of double standard pretty lame and disappointingly common. And it's one of the many reasons that we haven't been able to get reasonable copyright limits in place... because so many people want infinite protection for their own ideas even though it's obvious that society functions better with a less restricted idea flow.

At the moment I don't have anything popular enough to make a point with, but the creative projects
I have worked on I've made freely available. I'd like to think that if I ever had a big hit song or movie that I'd release it into the public domain after a few years, maybe 14 like the founders allowed. Maybe sooner if I could do so financially.

Cheers.

Oh, but it IS profiting off of the IP

[gcnaddict]

"And the software manufacturer isn't profiting off of your IP itself, just a way to check it against the IP of others"

See, the thing is, they are selling this service to other schools and institutions. The service they are selling relies on the IP, and as a result, they are making money off of IP which they acquired from students without their consent. That's the problem.

A couple hypotheticals:

[i)ave]

A hypothetical: Freshman year, English 1001: Student writes a 7 page paper and develops a good idea that they try to remember. Junior year, Political Science 3001: Student no longer has a copy of their Freshman year paper, but still remembers, almost word for word, a key sentence or paragraph that they wrote years ago. They include this in their Political Science paper, submit to turnitin.com and are flagged as a plagarist . Turnitin.com does not tell them what paper it is they have plagarized, who wrote the original work (even though it happened to be them), nor does turnitin.com explain to the professor that the "plagarized" paragraph was originally written by the same student. How does the student get access to the supposed "orignal"? Furthermore, is it not possible that this system is based primarily on a "whoever turns it in first, is automatically the original author" type of system? Suppose someone writes a paper for their own pleasure, or even for an entry for some type of scholarship. Someone likes his paper so much that they make a copy and hold on to the paper. That someone has a class and is asked to write a very similar paper, maybe at a different school, and decides to plagarize the original author's paper and submits it to turnitin.com. However, because the original author had never submitted his paper to turnitin, turnitin now considers the plagarizer to be the "orignal author" of the paper. Fast forward to a few years later when the orignal author is in their senior year in college and decides to submit their paper for a class that is calling for him to write something over the exact topic he wrote about years ago. When he submits it to turnitin.com, he is labelled a plagarizer, and he has absolutely no recourse nor any way to clear his name.

Re:A couple hypotheticals:

[Anonymous Coward]

First, let me say, I understand these students' feelings of mistrust. But let me offer another perspective. I teach at a small institution with about 2000 active students on my campus. We moved to using Turnitin because of rampant problems with plagiarism. I have had students give me exactly the same paper in two different terms and claim they were both original. These were not isolated cases either, it happened all the time. These students often either failed the course, or worse, got expelled. Since we have started using Turnitin, cases of plagiarism have decreased 75% on our campus! This means many students who might have taken the chance to plagiarize before do not. Instead, I receive papers that reflect them. Which is all I want. So, in the long run, for some students, this has been positive tool because plagiarism can lead to failure of a course or expulsion.

Addressing specifically the comments made to the parent poster here, there are some inaccuracies. For instance, the poster writes:

[Turnitin.com does not tell them what paper it is they have plagarized, who wrote the original work (even though it happened to be them), nor does turnitin.com explain to the professor that the "plagarized" paragraph was originally written by the same student.]

This not true. If a paper was previously submitted by the same student, the report will reflect that and I can request a copy of the paper from the professor of the course for which the paper was originally written. The professor has sole discretion on whether or not I get to see it. I have no recourse with Turnitin in as far as I am aware to demand a copy of it.

Many of the other materials that Turnitin catches are papers that have been posted on the Internet for various reasons, web pages, white papers, technical papers, etc. Turnitin helps me catch those faster than I would normally done. Generally speaking though, I would have caught those anyway. If you get to know your students, you can tell what their writing style is like. If they plagiarize, it is easy to tell because the style, diction, punctation, and syntax are different from what they normally submit. When that happened I searched the suspect phrases and typically found the original source.

The second example presented by the parent is far-fetched , but I suppose it is plausible. The thing is, what does Turnitin have to do with this? This same scenario could occur if Turnitin were not used. In that case, what is the recourse we recommend? Perhaps the original author would need to provide the original essay, application materials, etc. to show that he/she had written the work prior to this published copy in question. Frankly, I think in this case, Turnitin would expose the real cheater much more quickly than before. And perhaps, the real cheater would not be caught otherwise.

In reality, a high percentage hit in Turnitin does not necessarily mean a paper is plagiarized, nor do any of the professors I know who use it assume that is the case. We can clearly see that material that was properly quoted was included in the report. And, we have the ability to turn that off so we can look at only hits for which there are no quotation marks, citations, etc. that are apparent. From there we have to make a judgment call, the same as we would if we did not have such a tool.

Turnitin also provides other services that are invaluable to students and teachers. The grademark service allows us to mark up papers online and record grades directly from their. Students like this because it is entirely paperless and the turn around time to get grades is much faster. In addition, peer review, which is used in many English classes, can happen simultaneously so several people can read a paper at one time and comment. Most of my students seem to appreciate the tool and I have received much better work because they put in much more effort to make sure the work is theirs.

Is this the best way to teach this lesson? I am not sure. But as teachers, we com

Re:A couple hypotheticals:

[i)ave]

Lastly, and this will be shocking since I am an academic, but this IP / privacy obsession we have in this country is getting out of hand. Many people seem to have the impression that every precious thought from their head deserves protection and eternal ownership. In fact, most of it is not that interesting and will not benefit them financially. In the long run, obsessing over IP is dangerous. If we choke our transmission of original and useful ideas with overzealous IP rights, we will cease to transmit ideas. The rest of the world will be glad to take over for us in this area and they will if we are not careful. This does not mean I support the idea that ALL information should be free. But in the context of Turnitin, is that English paper you wrote for freshman comp, or even your senior thesis that financially valuable? If you are a good student, wouldn't you like to help the catch the cheaters? After all, they get the same degree you do in the end, even if they cheat to do it.

I think it's odd that for so many in this country, an original thought is only worth protecting if it can generate money. That certainly seems to be a double-standard. Why is it acceptable for the RIAA, Microsoft, MPAA, Disney to have over 100 years of protection for their various forms of original thought, but a college student is entitled to none? Ostensibly, your argument seems to suggest that since a kid can't generate any money from their research paper, it's not worth protecting their right to ownership of it. Moreover, your argument seems to be that turnitin.com should profit from the college student's original work simply because the student isn't using it for profit. I guess what's good for the goose, is not really good for the gander in your mind (sorry, I don't have a paranthetical citation for this sentence).

Only works if essay is submitted electronically

[RobinH]

This only works if the essay was submitted electronically. Wayyy back when I was in high school we could only submit the essays in paper form, preferrably typed (but they did allow us to write it out in neat hand writing). Does this high school require that people submit their essays in electronic form? I would think that if you submitted all your work on paper then you'd at least force the teachers to scan the document before submitting it (making it that much more work). Or if you submitted it handwritten, there's no way they would sit there and type it in to submit it to a website.

Of course, if you're actually going to go through the trouble of writing it out by hand, you're probably not plagiarizing either. But at least it would help to protect your IP.

Re:IANAIPL, but...

[aussersterne]

Same for a copyright, if I understand.

And you're teaching at the college level? No wonder there's such miseducation and cluelessness about.

The moment you write a sentence, take a photo, paint a picture, or create any other kind of copyrightable work, you already own the copyright under law. You created it, it is copyright by you, and if anyone uses it without permission afterward and you can prove that you created it first, you have a court case.

Registration of copyright does nothing but offer one way to demonstrate this proof--by registering your newly created item immediately with a government agency, they have a record that as of date X/Y/Z you had already called this thing into existence and claimed it to be yours.

More to the point, at the college level a student's work isn't just classwork, but potentially the basis for a career in ideas. It is morally indefensible to force them to cede rights to these ideas before they are prepared to publish on their own accord. It could seriously compromise a career if the clearinghouse was sloppy with security or if it made mistakes in misidentifying plagiarism (for example, even clerical errors--my paper #234533 was reported to be plagiarized, but that's actually because some other kid's paper ended up overwriting mine at #234533 due to a filesystem or programming error). I as graduate student working on a Ph.D. absolutely wouldn't consider attending such an institution.

Re:It does not matter if they are concerned

[Aadain2001]

This actually touches on a gray legal area: the legal rights of minors. While there are definately rights that you are born with (and a few that some people believe begin at conception, such as right to life), others are more fluid. When minors cross the entrance of public schools, many if not most of their rights disappear. For example, where adults have the right to property that cannot be removed without lawful cause, minors can have anything and everything taken from them by school officials if they deem it necessary (think cell phones, pagers, magazines, etc). So, is intellectual property the next 'right' that minors will have stripped away once entering a public school? Will schools, therefore, start claiming ownership of ideas the students think of during school hours, much like corporations claim the ideas of their adult employees?

I think we are seeing the start of a new legal debate: what rights do minors have or not have, and who can take them away? If some 17 year old comes up with the next great business idea while sitting in his computer programming class in high school, does the school have legal rights to the idea? Does his parents since they are legally responsible for him? Or, since the school is a public school, does the State/Federal government have first rights? In an age where IP rights can mean the difference between just another computer program and a billion dollar empire, questions like these are going to be asked more often.

Copyright Notices?

[BobSutan]

Looks like its time to start using copyright laws to our own advantage. I can see a day, sooner rather than later, when each and every paper I write has the following attached to the bottom, similar to what websites already do today:

Copyright 2006 [Insert author's name here]. All rights reserved. No portion of this document may be duplicated, redistributed or manipulated in any form.

Hey, if its good enough for the NBA, NFL, etc for protecting their works then it should suffice for a student paper, right?

Re:A couple hypotheticals: (nope)...

[aaronl]

Yeah, that's a blatent pile of crap. *ANY* other time, it's a fools errand to do the same work twice. However, education is so twisted to the point of being backward that you get idiocy like this. If I write a procedure to manipulate a matrix in a certain way, and it took me 12 hours to develop, I'm am *definitely* going to reuse it whenever possible. To do otherwise would be a sign of mental defect, as far as I'm concerned.

What you're saying is that in a school, I should be required to waste my time repeating the same work that I'd done and that I'd already proven to understand, for the sake of some professor/teacher ego, so that they know that I was forced to spend xx additional hours of my life to make them happy. I'm sorry, but at this stage in my life, if I were to go back and take another class, and a professor attempted that kind of sanctimonious bullshit on me, they would be talking to my lawyer within that day.

My work is my work, and if I choose to reuse it in a similar situation, this not only demonstrates that I understood the assignment, but that I recognized that I had already done the assignment. It is a mark of intelligence to recognize this.

Re:my school

[Lord_Dweomer]

Also, the most important thing to remember about this story is THIS IS A HIGH SCHOOL! If this were a college, the school might, MIGHT just be able to work a clause into their student contract BEFORE the student registers and starts paying stipulating some use of their copyrighted works for use with this system. However this is for mandatory highschool, this is state mandated and I think they'd have a hard time arguing that the state can force every student to hand over the copyrights to their works.

The school I'm sure will make the ethical argument that if they are not cheating, they should have no reason to object to this service. However the best case these students have (although IANAL) is that this service is profiting from retention of their papers and in fact would not be able to be in business if they were not allowed to keep copies of student papers.

I've seen some people post in this story saying "but they're not DIRECTLY profiting from the student's work". The hell they aren't! Their service 100% relies on the ability to use existing students' work to compare against. How is that not directly profiting? They are incorporating the students' work into their product/service. And the students receive no compensation.

What MIGHT be acceptable is if the students had an option (very important, they should in no way be forced) to sell a license to this service to use their works and were paid an agreed upon annual fee for its use. Yes, it would cost the service an assload of money...as it should if they are profiting from copyrighted works.

gross disrespect

[sg_oneill]

Wow. what an opinionated by line.

The entire problem with these systems is they represent a gross distrust of alot of innocent students. If 25% or thereabouts cheat, it means 75% do not. And that 75% are entirely entitled to be pissed off at there essays being kept in some stupid anti-student database.

I would of never dreamed of doing this shit to my students back in my university days.

Respect is a 2 way street. If you want to get it from your students, you got to respect them first, otherwise you simply dont deserve it.

Re:self-plagarism

[Lord Ender]

Wow. Your school sucks. At my school, most profs would explicitly say that it is OK to use your personal work from another class if the assignments were the same.

I never heard of ANYONE getting in trouble for doing so.

If you retook a class, you could resubmit the homework.

The only reason for teachers to want to stop "self plagiarism" is because it would demonstrate how lazy and inconsistent they are about grading.

Re:my school

[Marcion]

The problem is not low-quality students cheating, its low-quality teachers who need software to tell whether their students wrote their essays or not.

When I was at school, good teachers would know if a parent or sibling had helped because they obversed and tended the growth of knowledge themselves, they did not leave it to a web application or 'virtual learning environment' (virtually learning=almost learning=not learning?).

Re:my school

[Sage Gaspar]

Just some advice freely given, that I learned far later than I should've, but not too late: you are responsible for your own education. Not a teacher, not a book, not an educational system... you.

The school system as it stands right now is better than nothing, but it sucks for a lot of people. Unfortunately, them's the breaks. It's an issue that stems from overconcerned parents, underconcerned parents, lawsuits, slacker kids, genius kids, average kids, turn-of-the-century steel magnates, bad teachers, good teachers, shitty administrators, well-intentioned school boards... and it's had a looong time to evolve. All you can do is the best you can to make sure you come out with an education. "My algebra teacher sucked" isn't going to impress a college recruiter, or a job recruiter, for that matter.

If you're in math class and your teacher's droning on, try and work out some basic number theory stuff for yourself. Try to figure out the basic relationships in calculus before you get there. If you're really advanced try and come up with theorems and prove them. In history class, when the teacher brings up a famous person or an event, try to place it on a mental timeline. Think of who else was alive at the same time. Would they have known each other? How would they have interacted? What were the immediate and future causes and effects?

English is sort of a lost cause if you're not simply reading in class, because you will always be saddled with dimwits who will lower the level of discourse, and the class is all about the discussion. But you can still play the mental game of placing it historically, figuring out themes, contrasting it with other works, all that sorta stuff.

Actually it's sorta sad, one of the classes I think that high school really could use is some kinda philosophy, but it's absent in most curricula. I'm guessing because of the parental complaint or even lawsuit factor if people started discussing gay rights, morality through religion, civil disobedience, etc. But those are the things everyone can get a handle on, because they're basic issues to human existence. And they also might challenge some preconceptions, which is what school is really all about, after all.