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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 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
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
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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