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

Whiners

[zoomshorts]

The pot calling the kettle black. What else is new?

Let's be practical here

[BeeBeard]

Diclaimer - I am a lawyer, but the following shall not be construed as legal advice in any way, shape, or form:

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.

This doesn't pass the laugh test, sorry. Any judge would dismiss this with prejudice. As the original poster stated, the student's ability to publish her own work for profit has been in no way diminished. That is exactly what copyright laws are intended to protect.

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...I'll consider legal action.

And sue for what, exactly? Certainly not money, because your case suffers from the same problem as the other students--you have not been harmed financially in any way. You might have even eyed Section 504(c) of the Code and gone "Oh wow, I can sue for statutory damages!" but you won't get them, I can tell you that right now. You might get 200 bucks and a slap on the back. The best you could hope for is the remedy that you yourself demanded. That is, to get a judge's order demanding that Turnitin remove your papers.

If that's worth your time and money, then I say do it. Otherwise, consider this: What would you deem more important, your meager copyright on a few papers that have made you no money at all, or preserving scholastic honesty in America's school systems? If you chose "my copyright" then congratulations, there might be a job waiting for you at the ACLU. If you chose academic integrity, then you would be the same boat as countless schools across the country.

Cheers.