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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?"
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.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
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
"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.
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The problem is, the students are not employed. They recieve no compensation for their work.
T Money
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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.
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
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.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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.
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If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.
Who did what now?
Hey, if its good enough for the NBA, NFL, etc for protecting their works then it should suffice for a student paper, right?
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
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.
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.
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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.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
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.