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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?"
In a society where all High School teaches you to do is think inside the box and do what teachers/administration say, why the hell would they (the schools) expect anyone to be able to do any kind of work or create something new when all school has become is a baby sitting service?
As someone (yes I live in backward Oklahoma, however Norman is somewhat educated) who was constantly in trouble for being different and difficult due to my overwhelming boredom with the monotonous teaching techniques used. I would frequently get in trouble for ignoring assignments, classwork, etc. to do what I wanted. The material taught in most High Schools could be learned by a student in 1/4 the time if the student is remotely intelligent.
My best High School teacher saw this. We would ad nauseaum go over Algebra and Trig in class. He would assign a significant amount of homework. However for those of us that understood the work, if our homework grade was less than our test grade, the test grade would replace it (if it were 90% or higher). I would call out my daily score of 0. Test day would come. I'd review the material in the book. I would make an A or B. Our homework was only 20% of our overall grade as well.
I've never seen a machine strip the creativity out of students faster than the Public School Systems of our country. Learning is a chore here, not an enjoyable endeavor for most. I would venture to guess that outside of the social aspect (learning how to interact with different people), public schools hinder our society more than assist it. It's time to scrap the system and start over.
Oh I had a college biology teacher that was similar (it was a pre-college course in high school). He'd give you modules to learn at your own pace. You did X number before 6 weeks you got Y for your grade. I'd do all my work the first 2 weeks, then read the next four. I learned 10x what I did in my first two biology courses and had 12 weeks of an 18 week semester to read books, do whatever. The teacher was always there if you had questions, it just wasn't spoon fed.
End of rant.
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:
- 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.