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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?"
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/
I can see those students having a problem with that, after all it is your work and you don't really want others to keep hold of it while checking. It's like turning up to an airport, handing your mobile over for them to check it wasn't dangerous, and then them handing it back to you after copying your phone book and all of your messages off of it. The company should check it against the database, and then get rid of it, their database shouldn't be automatically updating with every paper that goes through it because eventually it will start catching out genuine work purely due to the amount of data that is being processed through it.
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. It's a tough situation to gauge, but the students have a strong point on the IP there. That being said, why not just add Wikipedia to the database and catch 99.9% of students, heh. Juding from teachers I know, Wikipedia is the bane of their existance when it comes to schoolwork.
Business Voyeur
"Do you think Bany of them are concerned about IP rights then?"
Pick any large group of people protesting about "protecting my rights."
Some will have the moral high ground. Others will be secretly, or not-so-secretly, violating other's rights.
It's just the nature of humanity and the law of statistics applied to large numbers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It does not even matter if they are the worst hypocryte of the world.
Their work. Their IP. It is so then protected and nobody can copy it without their agreement.
But now I bet that in the admission rules it will be written that "student give fully and eternally the right to the school to copy and dsitribute any essay they give back for a notation, for any usage. "
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.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.
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.
Keep in mind that a large group, like a student committee or slashdot, the group can be vocal oppontents and vocal proponents of intellectual property in different cases without any individual actually contradicting themselves. But taking that into account, I'll be there are still a huge number of copyright violators who would be outraged if their own copyright was violated. I find that kind of double standard pretty lame and disappointingly common. And it's one of the many reasons that we haven't been able to get reasonable copyright limits in place... because so many people want infinite protection for their own ideas even though it's obvious that society functions better with a less restricted idea flow.
At the moment I don't have anything popular enough to make a point with, but the creative projects
I have worked on I've made freely available. I'd like to think that if I ever had a big hit song or movie that I'd release it into the public domain after a few years, maybe 14 like the founders allowed. Maybe sooner if I could do so financially.
Cheers.
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
"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.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
At least within a single institution this should fall within the FERPA rights of academic employees, even without student permission. As long as the information being archived, be it records, projects, papers, or whatever, relates to the academic success of the student, we can pass information among others within the academic dept. In other words, if I wanted to build such a database within the confines of my institution and allow all my fellow faculty to upload material to be cross-referenced with my own students' material then I could.
IANAL either, but it would seem to me that they would be profiting from your IP. Sure, they are only using it to check against, but if you (as the student) don't explicitly allow them use of it, they are still profiting from your IP, whether or not they are profiting off of it insofar as selling copies of it. The bottom line is that schools have to pay for this service, and are paying, in part, to violate their student's IP rights. I don't view this as a way of protecting their IP rights -- if you are an upstanding student, then you will not make your essay available to anyone in any way, and therefore you don't want your IP rights to be violated. If you make your paper available, then you are allowing others to use your IP.
IANAIPL either, but you have a serious error in your post. Copyrights are NOT like patents. If you create an "original work of authorship," it is automatically copyrighted without you having to do a thing, and without any checks against previous copyrights.
Not to say that there isn't case law covering the student-teacher case, but the basic jist is that the students do automatically have copyrights on whatever original papers they write.
My problem is that they are profiting of my IP. They sell licences for this service to people (I tried to find out how much for but you need to apply for a quote). So they take my work and then use that as the basis for their business which makes money. I get no benifit out of this "service". I wouldn't even be as bad if they gave the students something back for it either financial or something for them as a whole.
If I was to take a copy of a peice of work from an "artist" and just keep a copy I bet you I'd be getting sued. If that is the new rules of the game then can you blame people for playing them?
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
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
This only works if the essay was submitted electronically. Wayyy back when I was in high school we could only submit the essays in paper form, preferrably typed (but they did allow us to write it out in neat hand writing). Does this high school require that people submit their essays in electronic form? I would think that if you submitted all your work on paper then you'd at least force the teachers to scan the document before submitting it (making it that much more work). Or if you submitted it handwritten, there's no way they would sit there and type it in to submit it to a website.
Of course, if you're actually going to go through the trouble of writing it out by hand, you're probably not plagiarizing either. But at least it would help to protect your IP.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
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
Ok, so they check it against a database comprised of 22 *million* (and counting) papers plus "online sources and electronic archives of journals". We're not talking about graduate students working on their PhDs and whatnot, not even college level papers, we're talking about relatively trivial subjects on High School papers.
;) Think MySpace/Other-Personal-Pages-Service and the preemptive screening of such public material on the part of would-be employers. After all, we've all done them at one time or another.. And this is just one example I can think of.
When it's becoming increasingly difficult for one to come up with a truly original way to express an opinion which is most likely shared (and has been written down before) by many of one's peers, even when on very specific subjects, out of the General Public's "reach", not to mention to actually come up with something altogether new, I would assume that for your typical High School English Lit. report, which thousands of others are also writing, and millions have done before, it would be nearly impossible to write something that couldn't always, somehow, be construed as plagiarism.
So exactly what constitutes plagiarism? Direct, uncredited, quote from some source posing as your own thoughts? Yes that would be correct, I suppose, but only if you did it *willfully*. And with such an extensive database it's not that impossible to unwillingly write an entire paragraph 'ipsis verbis' to some previous paper. It seems to me a bit like the mess we've got with the software patents and how it's basically impossible for any developer to know whether the code they're writing is infringing a patent. And anyway, how many words are we talking here? How many consecutive verbatim words constitute plagiarism? A whole chapter, a paragraph, 20+ words, a phrase? 'Cause it can't possibly be the general gist of even a small part of a paper.
Does rewriting a paper you found in your own words also count? Again, when your writing a paper on something so widely discussed as 'Othello' (to use TFA's example), you are bound to write something that is nearly copy/paste to many previous papers, no matter how much of your own 'original' input you put in (pun unintended). It might just be me, but I see a huge false-positives potential here.
TFA puts forth the notion that some advocate this as a way to make students more aware that they need to give credit to the sources they use. I obviously agree with this, and I agree that when a teacher is trying to grade a student on a certain subject, and his/her ability to convey and support his/her opinion, he/she (the teacher) should be able to do exactly that, and not end up *just* grading that student's ability to use a search engine or the resources found at your local library. But at High School level I would assume that said teacher would be at least mildly aware of each student's writing skills/techniques as well as the "maximum expected level" of perfomance on that task (ie, writing the paper). And this, much more than a completely automated (read, blind) process, should be the way to sniff out plagiaristic practises. You don't get Lit. Nobel-level material from 100-word-vocabulary students.
I get the IP angle, I see the point and somewhat agree with it, but more importantly, I see a privacy issue. Handing a paper to your teacher is one thing. To have it inserted in a database without your written consent is altogether different. Do we really need shoddy papers we've written in High School to come back and bite us in the ass later on in life?
All in all, the idea has its merits, but I suppose that if it worked all that well, we'd have a similar system in place for pattent-checking (a whole lot more bucks to be made there, after all).
Anyway, just my two cents.
Besides, the school does own the works you do for them, the papers you turn in, etc. I really don't know by what means they do get it though.
Uhm... no.
You write it. It is yours. Schools do not have the right to republish your works until you give them that permission. It could easily be argued that sending your essays and whatnot to turnitin.com, the school is copying your work, and therefore violating copyright law.
I don't know how that argument would fly in court, as I am neither a lawyer nor a pilot.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Do you mean like GOOGLE?
How about requiring movie producers to submit their scripts, to make sure it's not the same old recycled plots and 70s tv shows, with a soundtrack filled with remakes of pop "classics" and thinly disguised rip-offs they hope the audience is too young to catch on to?
I don't care why you're posting AC
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.
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.
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.
Apparently, none of these students have read the IP policy at their school. At least at my University, anything you turn in for a grade becomes the property of the University. By turning it in, you have implicitly waived your intellectual property rights over it anyway. Granted, I don't think that's fair in the first place, but the simple fact is that many of the students don't have any rights to the papers to begin with.
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.
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.
You know what's even more annoying? People skating through college by cheating and then getting a $150,000/year job when they can't even point out individual states or countries on a map unless they've lived there. It's annoying that morons would rather spend all their time partying and waiting until they're down to the wire on turning a paper in, so they think it's ok to go online and find or buy one. What's annoying is talking to a college graduate who uses the grammar of a twelve-year-old. That, my friend, is annoying.
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.
- 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.
What might be possible is that you grant a license to the university that allows the university to do whatever it likes with your papers, but you still own the copyright.
Check out section 204 of the copuright code
Probably the university owns the physical copy of the paper that you turned in, but not the underlying copyrights.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
To call the use of Turnitin a "witchhunt" is a little disingenuous, don't you think? It implies that those who are caught plagiarizing are wrongly accused.
It implies a presumption of guilt of ALL students whom are subjected to the search and have their works appropriated.
I'm also not convinced that the notion of implied copyright should be twisted to prevent students from contributing to a system that prevents cheating.
Well, I'm not convinced that current copyright law "promote[s] the progress of science and useful arts" but as long as the law is the way it is, then it really doesn't matter what you or I am convinced of.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
"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.
Same ol' Slashdot. Look, I am not your foil, to be used for idealistic grandstanding. You pretty much just cut and pasted a few things I wrote, without any context, got modded up for it , and then ducked the real question I posed, so here it is again:
Why would a student not want to contribute to a system that helps to ensure high academic standards?
I can't answer that question myself, and apparently you can't either.
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.
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?
Again, you've confused one thing for another.
Well, when you put them in two consecutive sentences where one is contructed to support the other, can you blame someone for not having the ESP to know that they really aren't related? If your intent was not to support your opinion about how a judge would rule, just why did you write that following sentence? Just a random fortune cookie perhaps?
If you are asking me if a judge, tasked with interpreting the law, will dismiss the claim of a plaintiff who files a petition stating something along the lines of "their copyright has been infringed but they haven't been harmed in any way except that they're unable to sell a paper to another student in order to facilitate academic cheating and somebody stole their lolly" then yes, that will happen.
Strawman. Eric made no such claim at all - really you are the only one making that claim. So congratualations on the self-lovin... Clearly you enjoy it, with all your cookies and milk and squirmin.
In fact, Eric made the point that turnitin is using their unauthorized copies for their commercial benefit. Clearly if they are using the copies to make money, then they fail one of the key tests for fair use.
I'm convinced that the average Slashdot poster would argue with Larry Wall over Perl syntax.
Lol. You aren't even a contributing author to title 17. I've met Larry Wall and you sir are no Larry Wall. Your hubris about your linguistic and syntactical finesse is definitely not Larry's kind of hubris either.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.