Students Sue Anti-Plagiarism Service

jazzbazzfazz writes "It seems that some students in Virginia are not happy with the anti-plagiarism service Turnitin. The company checks prose submitted by its customers for signs that it has been copied in whole or part by comparing it to a large database of works that it maintains. Trouble is, it also adds the submitted prose to its files and stores it for use by the company in future scans, which the students feel is illegal use of their copyrighted materials. I think they've got an excellent case, especially since they seem to have prepared for this eventuality: they're A-students, never been accused of plagiarism, and they formally copyrighted their papers prior to their submission to Turnitin."

Comments

Why woudn't they want their work cataloged

[jhfry]

I realize that it does indeed violate their copyright, but as a student, wouldn't you want your paper in their catalog so that some lazy student can't make it through school by plagiarizing YOUR work?

I don't know about these students, but when I was in school nothing bothered me more than students asking to see my answers, cheat off my tests, or read my essays for 'inspiration'.

But then again, it is a violation all the same. I say if it bothers them, go for it the law is on their side.

Re:Why woudn't they want their work cataloged

[stinerman]

You're asking the wrong question. The question is not "why wouldn't you want to deter cheaters from using your work". The question is "why would you want to let other people make money off of deterring cheaters by using your work - without you seeing a penny of the profit".

In essence, Turnitin is making a good deal of money by using other people's work. If those people want a cut of the proceeds, I don't see a problem with that.

Re:Uh... no.

[stinerman]

Can you show me a cite that backs up your position or did you just pull that out of your ass? That might be the case in Canada (I noticed the .ca email address), but this is a case in the states.

I signed no contract in primary or secondary school that said my work is the property of the school, and copyright law has no provision that makes such a theory true. The closest thing that comes to mind is works for hire. And I don't think any copyright attorney would argue such an asinine position.

Re:Terms of Service

[t0rkm3]

And the greater question is... Is it an undo burden by the school on the student? Can the school legally force the student to consign their work to the intellectual property of a non-public third party?

Say what?!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

A "clear case" of fair use? It's copying the entire work, and it's doing it for commercial purposes. That's the worst possible result on two of the four criteria, before we even start on the others.

And how is this at all the same as Google's book search?

Re:Say what?!

[mrchaotica]

It's copying the entire work, and it's doing it for commercial purposes.... And how is this at all the same as Google's book search?

Google book search also copies the entire work, and does it for commercial (advertising) purposes.

I'm not sure why I had different initial opinions in the two cases (for Google but against Turnitin), but I have to admit the cases are pretty damn similar.

Re:Clear case of Fair Use

[metlin]

While I won't repeat what others have said, bear in mind that one of the essays had an explicit notice forbidding them from archiving it, but Turnitin went ahead and did it anyway.

And secondly, the company is making money using the content from the students.

How is any of that fair use?

Not to mention that these systems are used by people assuming that all students cheat, which is bad to begin with. So much for morale.

Re:Clear case of Fair Use

[bigbigbison]

First off, there have been a lot of legal rumblings about google's book search. Google has modified it so that they no longer have the whole book online unless the publisher allows it or it is out of print. If you want your book out of it, there is a way to do so http://books.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answ er=43756&topic=9011 Turnitin has no such opt out process.
Secondly Google offers this as a free service. Although it has ads, there are also links to several book sellers which would allow the person who wrote the book and the publisher to get a sale from it. Turnitin is not a free service. They are directly profiting from the work of college students who do not and cannot see any monetary reward from their work being forcefully included in the turnitin database.
It doesn't sound the same at all to me.

Re:I predict

[mrchaotica]

I'm an English major and that's pretty much all we do in my classes. If people were cheating I'd have encountered it at least once by now, and I haven't.

Anybody who's an English major presumably wants to be one because they enjoy writing (due to the "do you want fries with that?" job prospects). Therefore, they wouldn't want to cheat anyway. In contrast, the types of majors that people who care about money rather than the subject go into, like management, probably have a much higher incidence of cheating.

Probably not fair use.

[Kadin2048]

I don't think the fair use defense is going to hold water. The situations in which you can claim fair use are pretty slim; a for-profit service, who is obviously deriving some economic benefit by using somebody else's copyrighted paper (by adding it to their database) is probably not going to qualify. I'm not sure what harm the students can claim, but if they have any decent lawyers at all, they'll find some way of doing it.

I actually wouldn't mind if it was covered under Fair Use, because I think that's something we could really do with broadening, but the law as written today wouldn't cover it.

Now, what I think will happen, is that Turnitin will advise its clients (schools, universities, etc.) that in order to use the service, they must obtain a release from students that includes permission to upload the files. This way, they'll just offload the responsibility for copyright infringement off on the schools, who will just force students to release their work, or refuse to give them a grade.

I don't think it'll be very long before, when you apply to a college or university, you also sign away all rights to everything you think, say, or do while you're there, in perpetuity, in any medium whatsoever. They'll just make it part of the admissions contract, and that will be it -- at least for private schools and colleges. I'm not sure what legal grounds you would get into with public schools, and whether they could force students to do that or not.

But I think the students in the Turnitin case, have just as much if not more grounds than the plaintiffs in the similar cases of book publishers vs. Google. (Actually, I think Google has a much better Fair Use defense than Turnitin does.)

Re:Probably not fair use.

[msblack]

Now, what I think will happen, is that Turnitin will advise its clients (schools, universities, etc.) that in order to use the service, they must obtain a release from students that includes permission to upload the files. This way, they'll just offload the responsibility for copyright infringement off on the schools, who will just force students to release their work, or refuse to give them a grade. What you state is already the case. Professors will refuse term papers
unless submitted through Turn-it-In which provides ample disclaimers.
Students should be complaining to the school district for forcing them
to give up rights to their paper. However, this is unlikely to succeed.
At the University, only faculty own their research. Students and employees
get no rights. Even student thesis papers belong to the University, not
the student.

Re:Probably not fair use.

[CodeBuster]

I don't think the fair use defense is going to hold water.

I agree...The courts have ruled in several different cases (not a legal scholar so unable to site the specific cases) that copying of an original work (article, essay, book, etc...), or even a critical portion thereof (as demonstrated with Gerald Ford's book concerning the Nixon Pardon), exactly as it was presented in the original work, even for purposes of subsequent commentary, still constitutes infringement of copyright and is not protected under fair use. In addition, due to the efforts of the RIAA over the years, it does not matter if one intends to "redistribute" the work or not (i.e. a copy made to share with your friends for free or even one made for personal use, as in the mixed tape for example), it is *still* copyright infringement. It should be noted that the courts have left it purposefully ambiguous so that each case is decided separately by a judge, but the precedents are strongly against Turnitin for maintaining whole copies of student papers, if indeed that is what they do (cryptographic hashing may be an interesting question if that is also going on), in their database and it doesn't matter if they show those papers to anyone or not, the very fact that there are copies in the database is enough to trigger copyright.

a for-profit service, who is obviously deriving some economic benefit by using somebody else's copyrighted paper (by adding it to their database) is probably not going to qualify.

Absolutely...this only adds to the prejudice that any reasonable judge would have against their fair use defense, especially in light of the reasons stated above.

I actually wouldn't mind if it was covered under Fair Use, because I think that's something we could really do with broadening, but the law as written today wouldn't cover it.

Perhaps the RIAA will actually write a "friend of the court" brief in support of the students to prevent that from happening (they wouldn't want that type of fair use precedent established in the common law). They say that litigation often makes for some strange bedfellows after all.

Now, what I think will happen, is that Turnitin will advise its clients (schools, universities, etc.) that in order to use the service, they must obtain a release from students that includes permission to upload the files. This way, they'll just offload the responsibility for copyright infringement off on the schools, who will just force students to release their work, or refuse to give them a grade.

I am not sure if the students can be compelled to do that since it could be argued that they entered into the contract under duress of not getting a grade and thus a degree. Even if this is effective, it would only prevent future claims, but the ones currently working their way through the system would still be valid and thanks to the RIAA the price per infringement is quite high, on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars per infringement which could make for a fairly spectacular judgment or at least a hefty settlement (bye bye student loans).

I don't think it'll be very long before, when you apply to a college or university, you also sign away all rights to everything you think, say, or do while you're there, in perpetuity, in any medium whatsoever.

Contract law is not omnipotent, if they make the contract overly broad then the contract can be dissolved by the courts or at the very least, assuming the contract is well written, the offending parts could be severed from the agreement (the court decides which language is struck) and dissolved while leaving the remainder of the contract, if anything does remain, intact.

But I think the students in the Turnitin case, have just as much if not more grounds than the plaintiffs in the similar cases of book publishers vs. Google. (Actually, I think Google has a much better Fair Use defense than Turnitin does.)

The students do indeed have a stron

Re:Probably not fair use.

[MvD_Moscow]

Your taking a slightly one sided view, no?

The point isn't about whether it subverts the educational process or not (I would agree with you that in this particular case, the students (the ones that don't cheat) have nothing to benefit from by shutting down turnitin), it's about how you apply copyrights. If a government implements a copyright system it should work for everyone, not just RIAA and the corporations. This means that the same rules apply to "pot-smoking communist students" as they do our corporate overlords.

If you are willing to make the benefits of copyright applicable only to one set of people/organizations, then there is nothing morally wrong with pillaging the seas for mp3s.

Your statement about value is even more stupid. I could argue that Britney Spears' shit (that corporations try to present as music) has no inherent value and it no way satisfies the requirement that copyrights were created for. To function (both in a legal and moral sense) copyrights have to be universal, it doesn't matter if I write a poem about how great pot is or compose a piece of music that changes the world, both these products have the exact same rights when it comes to getting copyrights.

If anything, you're just underlining how artificial and pointless copyrights (especially in their current form and with the development of digital technologies) are. They are not real, like corporations they are an artificial construct that were initiated in hope that it would benefit society overall.

You statements about inspiration from discussions is also lame. You would not be able to copyright the vast majority of mainstream music. After all, most of "gangsta rap" is represented by identical carbon copies. Add "bitches/bentlies" to the videos and "cash, money" and " Ima G" lyrics. What about the black cop/white cop formula used by many cop movies?

Copyright is not sustainable in it's current form and the fact that there is an issue around turnitin underlines this fact.

Re:Going nowhere fast?

[jaxom_01]

The problem is that the teachers/staff have no rights to give to Turnitin. The students hold all rights to their own works and the students were never asked to agree to those clauses. I think that it is a clear violation of copyright.

Hmmm....

[MarcoAtWork]

Given that many, many teachers give out broadly similar assignments all over the country, how many years it will be until most possible ways of talking, say, of what Dante meant in a certain canto in the Inferno, will be in the database and will make it impossible to write a paper without being suspected of plagiarizing? Especially if the system runs with a very low threshold (say, 3-4 words in a row that are the same = plagiarizing)

It would really be interesting if all the published books on one particular subject (again, say, the Divine Comedy) were submitted to this service and a check was run about just how much 'plagiarizing' and 'original thinking' there is going around...

Re:Going nowhere fast?

[PsychoSlashDot]

I am SO confused. I thought information wanted to be free? I thought we don't mind other people "sharing" data. I thought the person who puts their hands on the digital data is the one who decides what the creator should, or shouldn't be entitled to. I thought the copyright infringer is the one who gets to determine what sort of distribution methods are, or are not viable.

These students should be plenty happy. They get what they're "entitled" to out of their work: (good) grades. It's just greedy to be concerning yourself with the idea that some commercial entity which enables professors to MORE AFFORDABLY provide you your education (by way of spending less time simply checking for plagiarism) should be forking over some portion of their profits.

I know this'll be an unpopular viewpoint. Whatever side of copyright infringement a group of young student-types are on at the moment is the "right" one. My mistake.

When you hit grad-student levels and someone "steals" papers you'd otherwise publish, thereby depriving you of your livelihood, we'll talk. Otherwise hand in your damned homework, get your grades, pass you class, get your degree and go get a job.

Re:I predict

[mrbooze]

My wife is an adjunct professor at a university, and she pretty routinely nails at least 1 or 2 students for blatant plagiarism per class.

She doesn't use any special software or tools though, it's almost always obvious, such as when a student suddenly starts spelling words correctly they have never spelled right all semester, or using coherent sentence structures, etc, and usually googling a few snippets of the questionable paper turns up the plagiarized sources. (Yes, people just copy/paste from wikipedia and other sources without citing it and try to turn it in as their own.)

So, basically, this tool kind of sounds like it's more for professors that are too lazy, unobservant, or overworked to actually recognize their own students writing after a whole semester. And I guess for busting the genuinely clever plagiarists who are buying papers all semester long that they know haven't been published elsewhere online.

Re:Uh... no.

[russotto]

If that was the school's argument, it was pretty weak. If the school was in the US, the work could not become the university's property without an explicit written transfer; university policy is not sufficient. Further, even if turning in his own work was technically copyright infringement, it would not be plaigerism. They aren't the same thing. Plaigerism is the use of another's work without giving credit for it. You can plaigerize work in the public domain, and you can infringe copyright while giving full credit.

Of course, university disciplinary boards aren't known for their attention to fairness and justice, so I'm not surprised.

Re:It's a civil case, so you need damages, so...

[Jherek Carnelian]

It's not fair use if it adversely affects your market, and since your market is students wishing to cheat on their term papers, it's pretty drastic... so there's your damages.

The market need not be plagiarists, it could just as easily be the market for competing plagiarism detection services.

Re:Normalize.

[ADRA]

"but doesn't create a hugely cutthroat competition in the upper echelons of a class"

Maybe I missed something, but I thought we were trying to teach our children something positive. Do we really want to raise our kids to be even more confrontational, aggressive, mean spirited and anti-social? I would say no.

As an aside to this, I went to a polytechnic that involved a large number of randomly assigned group projects. Basically this threw the successful and underachievers into the same bucket. This whole exercise was basically meant to neutralize a self performance based metric into a group based success role. Teams that did well with each-other would always do better than mavericks, no matter how talented they were. The team working really gave a reflective picture of how you deal with people after those years of school are long over with. You have some who slack off and bring the group down. You have others that push hard to get their work done. Now the onus was on group members to either lift or tear apart each other.

And isn't that whats really important? We plagiarize through life, most of the time we never even think of the backs we're standing on. I would rather deal with solving the problem in a more creative way (like heavy group projects) instead of using technological means to force you to succeed. Some people will never 'succeed' in the way that society places on them. Are they worthless? If so, then we're not making very good use of our resources now, are we?

I you just can't implement something like the above and plagiarism is 'rampant', I see nothing wrong with an anti-plagiarism system as long as there are processes to deal with false positives and that everyone involved knows that it exists.

Re:Sue the pants off them!!!!

[Phisbut]

Yes, I would think that schoolwork is "work for hire" and would be property of the school...

The student pays to go to school, not the other way around. Students hire teachers to teach them. I don't see how turning in a paper becomes "work for hire".

Re:Terms of Service

[gr8_phk]

The general principle that universities use is that anything you turn in, you assign copyright to the university.

Bullshit. I never heard of a uni require a student to sign a copyright assignment agreement. nor did I sign one.

This means the instructor can use turnitin without violating copyright law.

Um no. Not without a signed legal document.

Is it right to require students to give up copyright over their own work?

No.

I don't agree with it, but it's not unreasonable.

Glad you don't agree, but it IS unreasonable. Imagine a "writer" teaching a literature class and snaging ideas from a few good students papers. Is that right? Aside from this potential abuse, is there ANY legitimate reason to require a student to assign copyright to the school? Just remember that the school doesn't have a place where they archive all these exciting papers they get. The prof normally grades then and gives them back.

Most assignments are similar to "work for hire", written to a specification of someone else for a particular purpose (in this case, grading).

Back to Bullshit again. No one is paying the student. In fact, the student is paying for an education.

Ah, ideal world utopias... how cute

[Moraelin]

Ah, ideal world utopias... how cute.

Let me tell you about those group assignments: _no_ university, college, or polytechnic _ever_ had assignments complex enough and under enough time pressure to actually _require_ cooperation. They're simple stuff doable by average students, who've been given 20x the necessary time for either to do it on his own. A really good student tends to plough through that assignment in an afternoon or two... and usually ends up having to.

What really happens in those groups is that you end up teamed with various clones of Wally (from the Dilbert comics), who can't be arsed to do _anything_ for the project.

E.g., take it from experience, in the first year in college I ended up having pretty much my own sidekick, sorta like Batman and Robin. His claim to glory was looking over my shoulder when I was at a computer in the lab. Now I don't think I was some kind of genius, but somehow I ended up with some "the great Moraelin" kinda reputation pretty fast. This guy ended up being "the great Wally" because he was with me all the time, so people _assumed_ some kind of teamwork was involved. It looked like pair programming, I guess, although that guy never actually offered any actual advice or information or ever coded anything for that matter.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a nerd, so I'll take any kind of popularity or friend, if it's available. I didn't mind having my own fan following around.

By the time we get our first group assignment, it seemed only natural to pair him with me. After all, everyone could swear that we're already such a great team. Let me tell you, the guy did _nothing_. Admittedly, I did do a stunt and come up with a far more grandiose idea than the professor wanted to give our team. (Hey, I must keep that "the great Moraelin" reputation.) But I asked him to do only some small trivial parts of it, merely token so I can say with a straight face that he did something too. To get an idea, by the end I had reduced it to asking him to write a function that draws two perpendicular lines on the screen. _That_ trivial. He didn't even do that. In fact other than reassuring me that he's working on it and almost ready, he didn't do anything at all. I ended up writing it all by myself.

The same theme repeated throughout college, even if with different people. I still wonder what had happened to my first sidekick. I think he wasn't around any more by the next year. No problem, I got other sidekicks. I even had a sorta girlfriend based on just doing her assignments too. She never even saw the program when we were teamed for such a group assignment, until we presented it to the professor. Wasn't interested in seeing it either. (And tbh, it didn't bother me much:) Smart girl otherwise, mind you, but, you know, why bother working when someone else can do all your assignments?

Getting teamed with another guy on another occasion, well, got me another guy pretending to be my best friend. He did at least paint about two pages of flowcharts after the fact, though, before getting bored with that too. In the meantime the "girlfriend" had been teamed up with someone else, but, hey, I got to do their work too, although I wasn't on their team.

So basically, please spare me the bull about learning to function in a team. I've yet to see even one team in college which actually worked as a team. Invariably it was one "maverick" doing all the work, and a bunch of Wallys doing little more than moral support, if even that.

Well, ok, so it may be a useful lesson for later. I was reading a study that said that about 3 out of 4 programmers can't actually program, or don't program, and just find some way or another to live as parasites off others. Ranging from "oh, you're my best friend, please help me", to taking all credit and trying to discredit the real worker to the boss, to being the boss's personal pet, to God knows what other creative ways. Yeah, you can get used to that kind of people in those group assignments, but that's about it.

But even that's not as useful as you may think. Yeah, it taught some of us geeks to be "good team players", meaning: to not mind a Wally just hanging around and taking credit. But it also taught whole generations of Wallys that that's one way to get the job done.