Slashdot Mirror
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?"
The students go to my high school. The school administration blatantly denied the accusations that it violates student rights on the school announcements system, and then these guys decided to get themselves on the local news.
They win in my book.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
When I was in high school a few years ago, they began to make us submit our papers through this system, too. It would read through the document and produce a number based on the likelihood that you cheated. I once wrote a simple paper for an English class and it ranked it as having a 27% chance of copying or cheated. The system was definately buggy and false positives can do an awful lot of hurt to a student's credibility.
At my University, it was made pretty clear in several courses that homework assignments and other submitted course materials were property of the University. You can, of course, choose to keep your 'intellectual property', but then, good luck passing the course!
Titus Barik
While it is annoying for people to be copying your work with you having no choice in the matter, it's even worse if they then are going to be using it to make money. If the company simply were to have massives servers full of students work that was just sitting there it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but they're making money off of it.
By saving every piece of work submitted they can say "Not only do we search for their work online, but we also have a collection of X billion submitted papers." This will attract new business and help the company to grow, the only problem is that it isn't the company themselves that's doing the work. Students are writing papers, being forced to submit them to the service, and that helps the service grow as a company, but they don't see a dime of the profits.
Not only that but we used it at my Highschool the last year I was there and it was terrible. My friend wrote a biography where he said "He was born in Newark." and it flagged him because another website had that same sentence. However if you went and took pages straight out of online databases (EBSCO Host and the like) it never caught you because it doesn't have access to that material. All in all a terrible system.
I just refused to hire a photographer who wouldn't agree to my terms. Eventually I found one who was willing to turn over full resolution copies of all digital images after one year, and he didn't even wait that long as it turned out. He got to charge us for time, the arrangement of the album, and all prints that guests wanted that they ordered off of the web site. He offered discounts for early orders, and by the time the book was published, the orders had stopped, and all rights were transferred to us.
Fair terms all around, just a small battle to find the right person.
Do you mean like GOOGLE?
I've used older works of my own as a basis for new work. It'd be foolish not to. Just like we all build our code into reusable chunks so that when it's needed on the next project we can leverage the time already put into it.
I had an interesting conversation with this about one of the senior staff members in our electronics department. He was of the mindset that plagurism really didn't matter if you structure the question in such a way that it need to show understanding. As long as the request is sufficiently targetted that you can't wholesale copy another paper, then what's the real problem if you find a paragraph in another person's paper that fits perfectly with what you need. (although in those cases why not just cite it as a source).
Engineering may be unique because papers usually need to show a deep understanding, and a professor who knows and works with you should be able to quickly see if it's not your work.
I can see how it would be a much bigger problem in something like English Lit.
Good nit-pick. You're right.
Which leads me to this interesting thought - since turnitin never even LOOKS at the paper, just copies it without authorization, it seems to me that what the students should do is this:
I know this will sound absurd - but I think the solution for any student who's educational institution uses this facility can resolve the issue of the copy of their work going into this database by simply copyrighting their work. Then if the turnitin.com people used their work there would be a basis for legal action.
Then perhaps all the people being sued for P2P violations should just use the argument that they are keeping the database for the purpose of check whether their 'students' are plagerizing RIAA's works.
"They're not preventing the student [artist] from enjoying any value that their essay might have"
Either, copying for non-profit use is ok or it is not. And in this case it is copying for for profit. This is so far over the line of illegal as to be astounding. As far as I know, there is no clause in copryright law that says "if it is a corporation doing the copying it is ok". The teachers are clearly redistributing copyrighted material.
There is actually a problem, I can't turn in my papers twice or turnitin.com will flag it as plagiarism.
This happened to a friend of mine. She withdrew from a English 101 class one semester and retried it under a different teacher the next semester. She started turning in papers for which she got an A previously to this professor and when he returned them a month later, she was informed that she would fail the class and it would go on her permanent record.
She even showed that it was her own work and the teacher knew it was previous work, but told her that he had a policy against "self-plagiarism".
It went to the dean, and he let her off the hook since the professor neglected to explicitly state such a rule in his syllabus.
This whole episode was not Turnitin.com's fault per se, but there are making it harder for students to reuse their own IP:) Which I think is bogus, how can you plagiarize yourself?
As someone who has went through turnitin.com, I can see both sides. However, I'm an engineer at heart - IP to me is an abhorrent word in some respects. Our whole culture is built on copying, modifying, and building upon. English teachers should design papers, tests on understanding of the question being asked if they want to prevent plagiarism.
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.
Good point. Maybe the students should start a handitout.com, which keeps a database of teacher lecture notes and handouts to check for plagarism. I wonder what the teachers would say.
- Copyright infringement doesn't require publication. If you rent a DVD and make a copy of it, you have almost certainly infringed copyright, even though you haven't "published" the work by making your copy available to any third party. In a copyright infringement lawsuit relating to a work with a registered copyright, publication may result in a larger award of actual damages, but has nothing to do with whether infringement occurred.
- As I understand it, Turnitin does republish the work, or at least fragments of it. If someone submits a paper, and Turnitin finds some degree of match with another paper in their database, reportedly Turnitin will supply the matched paper or excerpts from it to the course instructor.
I am currently taking a course that requires me to submit my papers to Turnitin. My objection to Turnitin is that they are not only infringing my copright, but that they are doing so for commercial profit. If they want to make money from storing my paper in a database, they should pay me for a license.I carefully read the Turnitin terms and conditions when I signed up for the account. I was particularly concerned that I might be forced to agree to terms that grant them a license to my work, although arguably if I was forced to enter the agreement in order to take a college course, the agreement might not be legally binding. However, there were no such terms in the agreement. The agreement primarily said that I would not make improper use of Turnitin's intellectual property, something that I have no interest in doing.
Every paper I submit to Turnitin contains the statement "Copyright 2006 Eric Smith. All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be stored in a database or electronic retrieval system without explicit written permission of the author."
After the course is over, and I have received my degree from the college (expected in December), I plan to send a registered letter to Turnitin demanding that they delete my papers from the database and provide some evidence that they have done so. I expect to either get no response, or a response stating that they will not comply. At that point I'll consider legal action.
All this nonsense is completely missing the point. The point is to get a education that works for you. The academic bias of the educational establishment has led to the devastation of the vocational training classes and an overemphasis on college-prep education.
Not everyone 'needs' to go to college; not everyone needs an intellectual classical education. In fact most people don't. People need to learn skills that will allow them to get a good satisfying job. A job that pays enough to support a family (along with your partner's wages).
An educational system that sends more than 20% of its graduates to college to learn literature, history, Western Civ, etc... is failing its society. Educational systems should start training people to do what they want to do much earlier than they do now. If you want to be a game programmer then you should start learning graphic design and computer programming at ten years old. If you want to be a rock star then you should be able to study music, electronics, and fashion starting at ten. If you want to be a fireman then start learning chemistry, anatomy, and phys ed at an early age.
It doesn't matter to the people in vocational training if they plagerize from someone else; it only matters that they learn the material that they need to know. If they cut-and-paste it or copy it by hand from an encyclopedia, SO WHAT?!?
We don't need 20 million term papers about the symbiology found in the works of John Milton. We don't need 20 million people learning Foucault. We need 20 million people learning how to turn suburbs into organic farms so that we can actually grow enough food to live on when the oil that we turn into fertilizer becomes too expensive to use as fertilizer. We need people who know enough power distribution electronics to be able to utilize the conservation of the roughly 50% of the electrical energy that gets lost in transmission. We need people who know how to turn paper and sand into 4% efficiency solar panels.
We don't need people who give a fuck about whether someone is copying someone else's term paper.
Come on, people, join the real world. The real world is changing. None of this stupid shit that seems so important now will make any difference twenty years from now. Pay attention to what's seriously important. The educational establishment (in any country) is no longer seriously important. [..and stop going in deep debt from paying for useless college tuition...]
"We need 20 million people learning how to turn suburbs into organic farms so that we can actually grow enough food to live on when the oil that we turn into fertilizer becomes too expensive to use as fertilizer. We need people who know enough power distribution electronics to be able to utilize the conservation of the roughly 50% of the electrical energy that gets lost in transmission. We need people who know how to turn paper and sand into 4% efficiency solar panels."
And you expect them to do this without alegbra or critical reading skills? Yes our education system is a sad mess, but the idea of a common broad-based education is still sound, both as a launching platform for later academic specialization and as a cultural common ground for our society.
We are all just people.
In the course I am taking, I am forced to submit eight separate works to Turnitin, which could therefore potentially result in legal liability of $6000 to $1.2M.
Part of the purpose of statutory damages is to deter copyright infringment even in cases where the infringement does not cause quantifiable monetary damages. Without such provisions, copyright law would be much weaker.
The problem there is that you're in violation of the ethics code in those cases, so unless you're planning on getting kicked out of school when you sue them, not a great idea.
But if you see a case where it's okay to copy, go ahead. For example, you could turn the same paper in twice(1). Or you could always cite his paper. ;) Yeah, it probably wouldn't be allowed as a required source, but teachers don't mind people citing more sourses than required. (You could always say that you read his paper before getting the assignment, and some ideas stuck, so you had to cite him or it would be dishonest.)
Or, heh, you could write a nice paper on some topic you knew was coming up in some later year (Yes, some teachers are that predictable), have a notery date it, and then sell it to one of those paper reselling places. Then turn it in later, hoping someone bought it and already turned it in. That might violate the honor code, though, so instead give it to some friend who isn't in school, and let him resell it. (Which is technically violating your copyright, but as this is a scam, you can just assure him you won't sue.)
The weirdness here is copyright law and scholastic ethics code interacting oddly.
1) That introduces a weird problem. What if, say, I turn a paper in high school for AP prep, and my high school doesn't use this thingy. Some other kid copies it, and turns it in at some place that does use this service. (Maybe the school just started, or maybe it's another school.) Then, I go to college, and, ha, get assigned almost exactly the same paper. So I haul out my old research, check for new developments, retype almost the same paper, and turn it in. If their software is any good, it really should detect plagerism with that other kid, if the cites, the topic, the ideas are all the same...but obviously plagerizing yourself is allowed under honor codes.
Not that I'm entirely sure it can detect plagerism...maybe it's just detecting 'copying'. I suspect students grabbing a web page and rewriting happens more than getting a literal copy of another kid's paper, because that's what people always did when I was in high school. (Except it was an encyclopedia, not a web page.) Maybe it's changed, though.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
If it's all the same to you, I'll just think of you as a very poor copyright lawyer since any copyright lawyer worth his salt would have never asserted that there is no infringement as long as the owner's ability to publish for profit is not affected. Even this dim-witted and self-righteous slashdot poster knows that without having to look up the cases in westlaw.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
All it does is stop her friends from turning it in as their own work.
Which is perfectly legal action on her part, BTW. If she wishes to give away, or resell, any work of hers with the express idea that the receipient will turn it is as their own work, that is perfectly legal under copyright law.
You don't have to come up with some 'moral' example, just a legal one, to win a court case. The illegally-copied work has been devalued by the copying.
Although it would be best if you'd actually graduate high school before making the assertation that you wish to sell your papers to others, but can no longer, and thus should be able to recoup damages, as doing that is probably against the honor code.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?