Slashdot Mirror
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."
First post! Oh shit, I plagiarized this.
Then sell them pants!!!
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
I predict that instructors will, in the end, still be able to withhold grades if students want to belly ache. It kind of sucks that trust gets tossed out the window so quickly though.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Do the terms of service say anything about assigning the copyright to Turnitin? Or perhaps expressly allowing this use? If so, is that enforceable given that the school (probably) required students to use Turnitin?
If not, does this constitute fair use? I would argue that it doesn't, since Turnitin is doing it for commercial gain.
(IANAL)
Last year a big group of people submitted rough drafts to our instructor, they were all run through the system. Then, we submitted our final papers, they were run through the system too, but the second time the class had 30 students that were shown to plagiarize. It really needs work, I understand what they are doing, but the implementation steps on a lot of toes.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
This is identical to Google Book search. You may copy text for all sorts of protected purposes.
I hope it is thrown out while leaving plenty of egg on the students' faces.
This really pisses me off. I did all that work and it gets submitted, without prior consent sometimes, to a database for a company to make a profit off of while I get nothing in return? Of course, it all depends on the university as well. For example, I'm doing a year abroad. It shocked me that before coming to this university, we had to basically sign over copyright to the university for anything we created while students here. Essentially, every single project or paper I have turned in for a grade to this university now belongs to them. I raised the issue with the director of the program and she looked at me as if I was some sort of freak because I actually like retaining the rights to any content I create, giving it out as I see fit.
Not like that at any school I've been to.
Now, around here it IS fairly common for clauses specifying ownership of IP to be present for faculty and research staff, but not for students.
My homework is finished, it is not yet copyrighted and you haven't returned the nondisclosure form to my attorney. Deduct points and I'll sue ya.
Preface: I am not a lawyer, I can't even play one on TV. So.... I would have assumed that when they sign up to use TurnItIn they agree to some sort of legal terms.... perhaps that's not the case?
If they did, I would assume the appropriate lawsuit would be against the schools that are forcing them to attend (truancy laws) and submit copyrighted works.
That, in turn, would never work for (American, at least) University students, as from what I know (the few I've attended) they have students sign agreements about the works they produce while in class, etc.
AnyUniversity, USA
New Student Application
The undersigned hereby agrees to allow AnyUniversity, henceforth known as "The Univeristy," its employees, officers, and agents, a non-exclusive, perpetual right to store or publish copies of all work submitted for course credit.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
...and they formally copyrighted their papers prior to their submission to Turnitin. What exactly does that mean? I was under the impression that the mere act of creating the work rendered it "copyrighted".-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
I'm not sure of the law regarding the service, but wouldn't seem too far out if they began offering their repository as a student research tool. The product may not be professional quality, but it would sure give one a lot of ideas when writing yet-another-paper on Biblical symbolism in Moby Dick. Everything should be footnoted, so you could go back to the sources too.
If so, here's a better idea. Take the money spent and apply it to hiring more teachers to get smaller class sizes. This way, teachers can get a good idea of their students' voices and be able to tell if something seems plagiarized. Hey, this might even have other benefits for the kids too.
I don't believe that is entirely true. I don't think it necessarily becomes the schools property, especially if the authors specify alternate copyrights. In addition, I don't believe that the school can use your work for absolutely any purpose they wish, which tells me that they are granted limited rights (educational use?) however they are not made THE copyright holder.
Of course I could be wrong.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
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.
I didn't want that god damn bot spidering me anymore so I went to the URL they offer during the crawl: http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html
Right there it tells you how to turn the fucking thing off.
User-agent: TurnitinBot
Disallow: /
One of the McLean High plaintiffs wrote a paper titled "What Lies Beyond the Horizon." It was submitted to Turnitin with instructions that it not be archived, but it was, the lawsuit says.
So, instead of suing first, I assume that these students sent a certified letter demanding the content be removed from the database? The article doesn't specifically say, but I have a feeling that's not what happened.
Here's the relevant section of the Turnitin usage terms:
"Your License to Us: Unless otherwise indicated in this Site, including our Privacy Policy or in connection with one of our services, any communications or material of any kind that you e-mail, post, or transmit through the Site (excluding personally identifiable information of students and any papers submitted to the Site), including, questions, comments, suggestions, and other data and information (your "Communications") will be treated as non-confidential and non-proprietary. You grant iParadigms a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, irrevocable license to reproduce, transmit, display, disclose, and otherwise use your Communications on the Site or elsewhere for our business purposes. We are free to use any ideas, concepts, techniques, know-how in your Communications for any purpose, including, but not limited to, the development and use of products and services based on the Communications. [bold & italic emphasis mine]
The bold part is what will kill the suit (assuming it predates the filing of the suit), but the italic part is pretty scary too: if your submission is something involving an invention, you just granted Turnitin an unlimited license to use your idea for any purpose.
-- Old Man Kensey
It seems to me that eventually every paper submitted to such a service would come up flagged as plagiarized. Since it keeps collecting papers, eventually two of them will match. How many different reports can a kid write on, for example, nuclear power? Isn't plagiarism supposed to be the direct copying of a work? How can such a system prove that the work was copied rather than just coincidently similar?
So, the school would own the coprigths only if they had prior agreements with all students to this effect. Personally I'd consider that completely batshit insane, seeing as schools don't generally pay students, but I realize parts of the US school-system is somewhat different.
Going though their terms of use, it would seem they do not try to claim copyright (which is surprising, as many others try to landgrab user copyright). This really could land them in hot water, as they then don't even have a contract to rest on. Does anyone have their clickthrough for students? I am curious what the legal ramifications of being used in a public school are, as it would be a legally enforced (you have to go to school) theft of copyright. I am also curious what their storage was like, as if they didn't respect a request not to archive a paper they are in hotter water then if they never asked. It would be interesting to have tried sending DMCA notices, as this would force them into a even more sticky situation.
If people can connect to one another even the smallest of voices will grow loud.
--Serial Experiments Lain
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Grad students are a different story, particularly for students on research fellowships.
The rules are usually spelled out in the University Catalog or other published policies.
I expect either the students or the university will have an "instant win" by pointing to the policies and the Catalog.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
...or so Slashdot has tried to convince me.
Submitting work to your instructor typically conveys certain non-exclusive perpetual rights to the materials upon the school. It does not, however, strip your rights to the materials. Unless you signed an agreement, it most certainly does NOT allow the school to transfer those rights to a third party. This is a good fight and I hope it sets precedent.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
I hope they win. All too often copyright is being used as the tool of large corporations against the little man. It's time the individual fought back against the big companies.
Turnitin.com plays on the rampant fears of plagiarism to sell a service students really don't have any choice of using. The teacher submits the papers, and the students have no control over their copyrighted material. You essay, your intellectual property, disappears into the black hole of turnitin.com and never comes out.
For the ensuing discussion, let's get some legal concepts down first. If the case ever gets to the merits, will come down to the issue of licenses and fair use.
Some points then:
* There is no "formally copyrighted" process. There is registration. Registration helps with damages, proof, and some other things, but it is not necessary. Fixing a creative work in a tangible form is about all that's needed for a copyright.
* The students, writing for a school, are not employees and they were not making works for hire. They are not employees. Even if they are independent contractors, there is nothing in writing.
* The students, going to a school, necessarily permit some uses of their copyrighted work. This is particularly clear if it was known that this sort of copying was going on in the first place.
* This case might involve fair use. I know what the company is doing feels a little slimy, but for those of us that care about free culture/constitution/whatever you want to call it, we ought to advocate for a version of fair use that is expansive enough to cover this activity. If Google should be able to copy books so that we can search them (as google should), then this company should be able to do something similar with term papers. Remember, these rules apply to everyone, not just the companies we feel good about.
Alright, now have at it.
This time, it looks like someone purposely set up a test case at the same high school (in McLean, VA), by submitting a paper and specifying that it not be archived -- then found that it was.
Last time, I wondered if it was appropriate for a public high school to require students to contribute their papers to Turnitin.com's database. You might be able to make a compelling argument that private schools and public/private universities could do so as a condition of admission. But, how do you reconcile truancy laws and forced contributions to a privately owned-and-operated company?
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?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
As an English major (I type poorly so excuse typos) I can tell you first hand that Turnitin is horrid. Previous posts have talked about how submitting a draft and then your final shows your final as being plagiarized. But it's worse than that. It hits on common word usage, simple three word statements, hell even cliche statements that may be 2 words long, it marks them.
To make matters worse a large number of professors are starting to use this and treat it like the gospel. I know several students accused now of plagiarism, falsely, because of this system.
I am lucky this semester and have 2 professors who realize this and in a move to stop plagiarism have taken other actions, such as asking us to turn in all of our rough drafts and print/copy out our sources and attach it all to our final work, something you can still cheat on but are much less likely too.
Personally I don't know anyone who has ever cheated on a paper. I suppose with some of the fluff classes and electives some may have because those classes are a low priority, but by and large plagiarism is no where near as big a problem as these people make it out to be. High school maybe, but not in higher education.
This is a dupe, and it was discussed in some length when it first appeared. For what it's worth, my university (in the UK) had a clause stating that the copyright on all submitted coursework was owned by the university. Your might have too; quite a few of my contemporaries didn't notice its existence.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
more like you pay to work and they give a work review.
You can use portions of copyrighted works for all sorts of purposes without permission.
Now if Turnitin is deriving their methods from the copyrighted works instead of just doing fancy diffs on the entire work itself, they might have a defensible position. This should be interesting to watch develop as more details unfold.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
No. This is completely untrue in the U.S. I have no clue what Canada's law is.
In the U.S., however, transfers of a copyright (which means assignments or exclusive licenses) must be made in writing and generally have to be explicit about it. Additionally, students are not employees and so they're not covered by work for hire.
There is a good possibility though that students are, however, giving an implied license to the school. This means that the school can use their work non-exclusively in ways that the implied license would permit. This is a far cry from "any content that you submit as part of a course becomes the intellectual property of the school, unless they explicitly say otherwise."
If you don't like this, then I suggest you encrypt your next assignment so that the school cannot read it. That will show them!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
So I wonder if these same students consider the "cataloging" and sharing of copyrighted music just as infringing?
If it isn't infringing to share music via P2P, then why would it be infringing for school staff to share papers? Especially when in the latter case, they are doing it with the explicit purpose of preventing copying of the students work? Presumably, a student who finds his hard work copied by another student would have a copyright infringement case against the other student, provided that it was indeed copied without permission. After all, high school students would never stoop so low as to allow others to copy their work.
I'm thinking that more than a few of them have downloaded and shared music under the justification of "Maybe I'll buy it later... if I like it." But for some reason, it's only considered copyright infringement when it is their work being copied.
After all, if it isn't your work being copied, it's sharing, right?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
IANAL, but I don't see turnitin making copies, but they are using a copy given to them.
Google's main product is searching web sites. Therefore it has to read in sites and construct a search database for them. It doesn't have to distribute copies (leave aside that they sort of do by having an option for you to get the cached copy from them). Their product is basically a search against a database they have stored internally. Certainly the 'fair use'-ish extracts help the user quickly prune the resulting data, But thats not the main part of the search.
Turnitin may not even expose the cache they search from even to the extent Google does, so they are not making copies. They are using copies. Who made thos copies? The teachers submitting the papers to Turnitin, by the act of transmitting them to Turnitin. Perhaps that copying gets a pass under 'Educational Use'.
But if Turnitin get tagged for this, It may set a precident that could be used against google.
-- 3 events that reshaped the world in the 20th century: WW1, WW2, and WWW
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.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Of course, all that's irrelevant because this case concerns public high schools, not universities.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Says who? I'm genuinely curious, because people at your school or university telling you this, doesn't necessarily make it so.
This may depend on country, I don't know...can you point out any laws or precedents where this issue came up?
Because I don't know of any. (admittedly this doesn't say much at all as IANAL).
In principle you have copyright on everything you write, unless you do it as part of a (paid) job because in such cases you usually signed a contract that states any work you do [in company-paid time] becomes property of your employer. Also, you can explicitly transfer the copyright to someone else - this is what you usually (have to) do to get your work published in a journal, book or (scientific) proceedings. Because if you don't, they are not allowed to print/distribute it. I don't remember ever signing such a "contract" with schools or universities I attended in the past though...
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
There is a difference here. The papers in question were printed works, much like a book, in other words a single edition. The school was given a single edition for use in terms of grading the paper. However, it was not given the rights to further distribute the work, and most definitely not give the right for use by Turnitin, in fact that was explicitly stated on the works in question.
When dealing with the internet, if the creator of the work published it for distribution, it is giving an implicit right for it to be read by other parties, and potentially even copied for the party to archive and read later, unless otherwise stated. For bots, stating this is to configure the user-agent strings in the appropriate config files.
The difference here is in the medium. For all intents and purposes, publishing on the web itself is just like owning your own printing press and printing an edition of the paper for everyone who wants one. That is not how a physical work is treated. It is treated as its own single piece of property.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
You cannot even be party to a contract until you achieve majority.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's fine, but the school is the one responsible for making a determination of plagiarism, not a third party that then retains the material in contravention of copyright.
The school signed up for TurnItIn, but the students did not. The students are arguing that the school cannot assign the copyright for their work to a third party without their consent. They expressly denied their consent in a cover sheet to their papers.
Actually, I think the universities are still worth discussing, because many places do not have blanket IP surrender clauses, and there's a lot more valuable IP generated at higher educational institutions than there is at highschools.
Which is not to say that highschool papers are lacking in merit or value, but just that they tend not to be quite as marketable as college ones (and I don't mean just English papers here; think of the amount of research or other IP that comes out of an engineering or business school -- there's a lot of skilled man-hours there).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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...
-- the cake is a lie
If I wrote a short story for a class and the school turned around and published it and started giving it out to people, wouldn't the school be liable moreso than the business that accepts the publishing? I guess you can't really sue your professor for checking your essay for plagiarism. However, I do think there is a case against the company because they are retaining the records. It would be one thing to just check a paper against known sources and if it checks out OK, it then clears it and releases it from the database. If this case goes anywhere then that might be what the company will have to start doing.
The problem with that is that the students aren't submitting anything to Turnitin - they aren't the "you" in the Turnitin usage terms and they are not party to those terms. The school and teachers are doing that. The students probably didn't give the school or teachers a license to do that, I'm guessing.
As to the bit in the story blurb about them formally copyrighting their papers prior to submission to Turnitin, that isn't at all clear to me from scanning the article. What is much more probable is that the students formally registered their copyrights prior to filing the lawsuit, which is a requirement for suing on a copyright in the U.S. (Your work is automatically protected by copyright law, even without a copyright notice these days, but in order to sue for infringement you have to register your copyright.)
...the professors did, prior to submitting the students' work for cross referencing. How does Turnitin get released when the people suing never consented, or even saw those usage terms?
What this might end up doing is having a similar type suit brought against the professors and/or University. When the first one gets burned at the stake, the other schools that are taking note will quickly enact policies that would allow them to do this as a condition of attending their institution.
I don't know about undergraduate works, but it is common practice at colleges and universities in the United States to have a copyright notice attached to a graduate thesis. Right there, next to my advisor's signature, is "Copyright 2005 Trustees of XXXXXX College." That is the only instance that I've come across where the copyright of a student's work is even mentioned. The student handbook at my alma mater doesn't discuss the subject.
Then again, since we are talking about a public high school, not a public or private university, that kind of thing may or may not apply.
Don't tell me that you're proposing the "infinite number of monkeys, put in front an infinite number of typewriters given an infinite amount of time" theory...
(said in a joking manner)
Technically I believe you can, but minors can break contracts for any reason or some other such reason.
This is already the case. My 17th century British Literature Professor stopped using Turnitin.com because it became obvious, every idea relating to Milton had already been expressed in a million different ways. Just because an idea was original to a student, didn't mean that same idea hadn't been expressed previously by another. He told us every single paper he received had gotten negative hits from Turnitin.com because Milton had just been discussed to death.
If they wanted something I wrote in their catalog, they can damn well pay me something for it.
I probably wouldn't even ask for very much. Heck, I bet if Turnitin offered a buck a page, they'd get thousands (perhaps millions) of high school and college papers. Who here doesn't have a disk or directory sitting around somewhere, filled with old work from their HS or undergrad courses? I know I do.
When Turnitin misuses students' intellectual property in this way, they not only injure the students (who aren't getting paid for their papers, which obviously have some market value, or Turnitin wouldn't be scooping them up), they're also eliminating a much broader market that might exist, for original highschool- and college-level papers.
Now, I admit, the amount of harm to any one person out there is pretty small. Using my (B.S.) number of $1 a page, which is probably way above what the market would bear (although, to be honest, it's not that much more ridiculous than some of the other "damages" that get called up in lawsuits, e.g., the RIAA's value-per-song), I'm probably not being denied more than a hundred bucks, total. Perhaps there are some English majors out there who would be out some more, but it's not that much per person. However, since Turnitin's entire business model and revenue are based essentially on the repository of stolen IP that they use to compare other papers to, there's a significant amount of value in the papers in toto. (Similarly, even though the damage done to the music companies by any single Napster download was very small, it was obvious due to Napster's success as a company, that there was some value being derived from all that stolen IP.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This, coming from the same school who had students (from an intro to physics class!) expelled just a few years ago thanks to turnitin!
-50 DKP for lame post!
There's an possible way in which Turnitin might avoid the copyright issue.
They could issue a standalone program, for the use of tutors, which will break the submitted work up into phrase chunks, and store each submitted essay as a sequence of hashed phrases.
Storing it as a sequence of hashed words might still run foul of copyright, since a dictionary attack would be able to uplift most/all of the plaintext. But if the hashing granularity is phrases, then turnitin could argue that it is computationally infeasible to reconstruct the submitted cleartext, and thus what they're storing is effectively a 'fingerprint' of the work and not the work itself.
If they wanted to get really smart, they could break up each phrase into words, and by using a thesaurus, reduce each word to an index into a table of synonym sets. This could defeat circumvention attempts whereby plagiarists replace words with synonyms to avoid detection.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
To me the students are in the right, as the company is making money off of the works. The school should have the right to check, and use 3rd parties, but turnitin should have an option that says "Do not add content to the turnitin database" for students who do not give rights to use that. that or the students should be compensated a small percentage when turnitin uses their works to check other students papers for infringement.
"In a world without walls and fences, who needs Windows and Gates?"
Yeah, fancy that. Submit substantially the same paper to an anti-plagiarism site and the second time it comes back as plagiarized.
Oh. so not only do the universities get a buttload of money from the students, they also can publish the best literature or history papers and exams and make a profit off of it (because that is what it means for them to have all the rights to your intellectual property).
I, for one, don't remember ever signing my rights over to them, ever agreeing to it and I don't remember the professors wanting to keep my work after it has been graded.
It is precisely because they are profiting off of my hard work that I block them in robots.txt.
I didn't know that professors obeyed robots.txt.
I guess I shouldn't be so surprised...
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
When I was at university, a fellow student was almost expelled for plaigarism, after turning in a copy of his own homework. Here's the deal:
This was the second time he had taken the class, and he still had all his coursework from the prior semester. Instead of redoing one particular assignment, he simply turned in what he had done for the same assignment the prior semester (for which he had scored well). The professor gave him a failing grade and reported him for plaigarism.
His argument: He had done the work himself, he should be able to turn it in.
The school's argument: Per the contract, all work submitted by students becomes the intellectual property of the university. Upon first submission, the intellectual property rights were transferred to the university. Upon second submission, the work was now in violation of plaigarism rules, as it consisted entirely of intellectual property belonging to the university.
In the end, the schoolboard decided on leniency, and allowed him a short period to repeat the assignment, but made it well-known that this would not be tolerated in the future.
IANAL, but the students knew that when they turned in their papers that they would be submitted to Turnitin. By turning in their papers it was an implicit agreement; they could have easily turned down the submission to Turnitin by not... turning it in! It seems like a simple, implicit terms of use by the school/college/whatever it is.
Not sure if any of that has any basis in legal reality, but surely I'm at least close to something?
Sleeping on librarians?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
At the high school level, a student doesn't sign any contract with the public school system as far as I know regarding the copyright of material (it's high school, what are the odds that it's worth copyrighting?). So the school does not hold the copyright--the students do.
So if the student is compelled to use Turnitin.com, of if the teacher uses Turnitin.com without the student's knowledge, this could constitute copyright infringement I think. Even if the student (say, at a private university) had signed a contract on admission that all work submitted to the school became the intellectual property of the school, the work would still have the copyright of the student because they received that right before they turned it in.
So one person's document says that it is proprietary and belongs to the student. The other states it is non-proprietary and belongs to Turnitin.com. So whose fine print wins? I think that, if the student did not freely choose to submit it to Turnitin.com, then the copyright should stay with the student and the students should win.
(Personally I think Turnitin.com's Terms of Service are horrible and nasty, since they also make the school defend them. You agree to indemnify and defend iParadigms from any claim (including attorneys fees and costs) arising from your (a) use of the Site, (b) violation of any third party right, or (c) breach of any of these Terms and Conditions. I sure wouldn't do that.)
Funtime Candy Wow! - my plan for eventually conquering Japan.
but my question is this - if the company is using the students' work for commercial gain, and the work is submitted involuntarily (below a certain grade level the student doesn't get to refuse, after all - they have to turn it in for the grade and they are compelled to attend by law) mightn't this run into child labor law concerns? In effect, the kids writing the papers are providing work with demonstrable commercial value to the company. And not by choice, either.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
If you really want to drive the cheaters out of the woodwork, just normalize or force-curve the grades. Force-curving is significantly more evil (e.g., "I'm going to give two A's, 4 B's, six C's, 4 D's, and 2 F's...you're competing against each other,") and tends to cause ugliness (top students trying to undermine/flunk/kill each other), but a positive-only normalization has many of the benefits without the drawbacks.
If you say at the beginning of class that at the end, you're going to normalize the grades to 80 or 85%, which isn't terribly uncommon, then it creates an incentive not to help someone cheat off of you, but doesn't create a hugely cutthroat competition in the upper echelons of a class.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
(IANAL) Two questions:
1. How can they (iParadigm) enter into a contract with a minor?
2. How can they enter into a contract anyone without asking? Or does the student have to use the service before submitting the paper? If the teacher is the one that does it, this does not make sense. Someone else pointed out that their bot is crawling the NET. How does the ToS work for those people who never consented to this abuse?
Let's test this. Someone submit the lyrics to the top 10 pop songs currently on the chart. Make it a research project into current trends in music. Wanna bet that Turnitin now owns those lyrics to do with as they please? I don't think so.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
During my final year we were given access to this system so that we could check if our project report "accidentally" contained large amount of text from other sources without proper referencing.. And I have to say that the system is quite good.. It just doesn't come up with a result of Plagiarized/Not Plagiarized, instead it marks out the content of the text which appear elsewhere.. so if you see a write up which has a few paragraphs of match with very few words changed in between, you can be pretty sure its plagiarized.. It even gives the title, author info date etc of the original writeup.. quite a useful tool if properly used by teachers, before this I have seen people submit work which were directly copied off the web/older reports...
Just suppose I write an original term paper, all my own work, and I intend to sell it to other students who don't want to do that work themselves. Turnitin has no rights to my paper beyond validating that it doesn't match any other one in their database. Furthermore I've legally copyrighted my work, and they've taken it without compensation to me, and destroyed its future value in the process. I think the students definitely have a case.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I just think that they at least need to tie some type of user information into the system. What if I am submitting a series of papers that follow my development of thought or experimentation on a certain topic, chances are that large portions will be similar. If the papers that I submitted were tied into my student number then I wouldn't get dinged. Only being able to use the system one time per paper shouldn't be a limitation that the instructor has to work around, especially when the papers are automatically scanned when submitted.
it basically encourages the instructors to not allow the submission of rough drafts.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
i'm in canada and i've never heard of any such laws either.
MABASPLOOM!
Stupid ideas usually result in absurd circumstances. Suppose I research something, write my paper, and feel really good about my work. So good that I also immediately submit my creative genius opus to Wikipedia before even showing it to my teacher. I'll betcha that Turnitin uses Wikepedia as one of its online sources for checking, so odds are good it bounces my paper back as lifted it's entirety from Wikipedia and I fail the course. What is my recourse here?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Two papers I wrote as a phd student are now behind pay for access portals, where they charge $30 for a single copy, or a subscription.
Do I get a penny of this? Nope, and do I get free access as the Author? Nope.
Did they ask for my permission? Nope.
Its the standard way papers are distributed in the academic world. I think it's unfair as it stands, although I recognise they have some need to recoup their storage/indexing costs.
Incidentally, I started my phd with the explicit requirement that all software instantiations of my research that I created were to be released under the GPL, and that no-one else had control over my findings. I had an understanding supervisor, and the prerequisites were accepted.
I have some (very small) amount sympathy for the students, but for the most part I see TurnitIn.com as providing a useful service, and would be annoyed if it was crushed by copyright law. They only provide the student's works to a customer of TurnitIn if there is a match, so it's not like the student's work is going to be abused. In fact, unless they were planning on selling their work to other students, they shouldn't be harmed by TurnitIn at all.
I am annoyed by how everyone in the U.S. seems to think that if they wrote it, no one else should be able to read it, listen to it, discuss it, or reference it without giving them a share of the money.
P.S. The 'do not archive' student has a stronger case, and TurnitIn should remove her paper from their database.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
You may not have signed anything, but I bet your parents did. All sorts of things have to be signed in order to enroll a student into a primary or secondary school and you wouldn't have done it because you were still a minor. Now, since they were using the plagiarism service, it is likely that some clause regarding this company, and its use, were in there. IANAL, but I assume it was something like: "I agree that JOHNNY'S homework may be submitted to the Turnitin service for verification, and may be used in accordance with the agreement between OUR SCHOOL and Turnitin."
Once a parent or guardian has signed the paperwork, there is no legal right to prevent Turnitin from using it. I can copyright it all I want, but the right to use it is already given. Just like I can't open source code and then "change my mind" and demand it back. Now, if this isn't the case, I have no objection to their ability to determine fair-use doesn't include Turnitin. I'm just pointing out that it is quite possible that some clause was in the paperwork and the parents signed it anyway because if they didn't, they couldn't enroll their child in the school.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
English major ... types poorly ... four digit slashdot UID
*blink*
Did you buy that off ebay? :)
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 only problem being that apparently the Supreme Court tends to rule against the side it considers "bad". The question is, how many Supreme Court Justices paid for someone else's term papers?
Granted, their opinions do not affect their legal standing. I'm not sure why you interpreted my post as stating so. My point was that there's a cognitive dissonance in claiming the wrongfulness of copyright infringement of your own work while simultaneaously infringing the copyright of others. IOW, are these the same students who illegally share music? And if so, why are they being hippocrits?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
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.
I just started going back to school at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.
The current bulletin only mentions "ownership" in class descriptions and on the page about residency.
"copyright" is mentioned on the doctoral thesis page:
7. Microfilming of the dissertation is mandatory
for doctoral candidates. An abstract, which may not
exceed 350 words, must be submitted to the Office
of Graduate Studies with the University Microfilms
International agreement form. The charge for this
service is $55, payable at the Cashier's Office, after
picking up the necessary forms in the Office of
Graduate Studies. Copyrighting of the dissertation
is optional, at an additional charge of $45, payable
at the Cashier's Office.
And there are a couple more mentions of copyright for the dissertation (no explanation about what the $45 really gets you, as I thought once you put your creative work in tangible form it was automatically copyright-protected). There are also a couple class listings covering copyright.
"intellectual property" only shows up in a class listings.
"property" mentions buildings
- submitted transcripts become the property of PSU, along with all other registration/application records
- and appears in course listings
Nothing about transferring ownership of assignments is in the application either.
So, if the application (the document I signed) and the catalog are the binding legal documents for my work at the university, then at least at PSU, there is no indication that I'm required to hand over all of my work to the university in order to actually pass my classes.
Neutral fish dog squat salt the beer.
Most combinations of words have no meaning.
- a student is an author or a book or article
or plans to become an author and will in future
have to sign a contract the work has not been
submitted elsewhere.
- a student is concerned that some private information
will be stored in a database, which has an uncertain
future: the company could be sold to a data-miner which
finds and targets a population with a certain interest.
- the database of turnit in could be hacked and personal
information could be in the wild.
I have seen a demonstration of turnitin, in which a text was altered in several nonobvious ways and the software did not find a match if the change was not obvious. This means that it is quite ineffective for plagiarism which is not completely obvious. The software will likely be improved in the future but since there will also be less and less, which one can say without being matched with an equivalent sentence, the software could also become less effective if the database becomes larger. It also provides a business opportunity: there soon will be effective programs which take a text and reformulate it automatically so that it passes the turnitin filter.Either there is no such thing as "intellectual property" and the student's papers have no value or there is such a thing and they do. You can't have copyright when you want it and not when you do not.
I would say that clearly Turnitin's repository needs to be kept in a manner which completely and utterly disallows extracting things once they have been put in. Sort of like a one-way password encryption for text. OK, they can develop a hash of phrases and paragraphs and keep that.
But they certainly cannot have a repository that allows them to sell student's papers on the Internet. That seems like an obvious way to make money off this and encourage even more use of the teacher's service because if the teacher isn't using it they cannot tell when such a bought paper is turned in.
Turnitin supporters, read this article:
m l
http://www.essayfraud.org/turnitin_john_barrie.ht
If you can STILL support Turnitin after reading the facts, you probably need psychological intervention.
The schools and professors have the upper hand. The service will merely require professors and schools to get a signed blanket license on all assignments either when the student enrolls or the first day of class when the student can drop the class for a refund if they won't sign.
The problem with that is false positives. The only student I've ever seen get caught for plagiarism was, without a shadow of a doubt, innocent. He did get off, in the shortest deliberation on record for the Honor Council, but not before four weeks of wondering whether he was going to fail the course and lose his NROTC scholarship because the teacher couldn't understand why two students who barely knew each other would submit nearly identical code when he specifically taught the course such that we were all programmed to use the same solution on any problem he threw at us.
I agree with the "Do Not Archive" argument. Also, I wonder if anyone has challenged the validity of the rulings that Turnitin.com makes on papers. Does it cite articles that it thinks the works may have been copie from, or does it just simply say "Fake" and assign a number thet it thinks is appropriate.
Just because a website's algorithm says that a paper is "Likely Plagiarized" does not mean that it is plagiarism. Now, if a teacher marked parts of my paper as being "Plagiarism", would you just let it go, or would you ask them to prove the parts in question were plagiarized?
Teachers that take a website's "Plagiarism Probablility" as a definite rule of plagiarism are obviously not intelligent enough to be teachers.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Lucky you. In a rather dull undergrad level archaeology course, I was required to submit a term project which basically needed to be a method/program/etc. for a "novel" invention/improvement for archaeologists.
The professor passed out papers to be submitted with the final work which assigned rights to the University. I refused to sign. I made what I thought was an intelligent and calm case for my point -- immediately shot down, and received an automatic F (even though I submitted the work, and suspecting there to be a problem did so at the faculty office where I received signed proof it was submitted on time).
While most ideas were probably stupid in the great scheme of things, this was obviously a fishing expedition by the professor to hope to get a great idea.
Later, another professor wanted to use my idea from the paper. Lacking automatic license, we discussed it, discussed the other professor's actions, etc. The end result was the legal team for the school voiding all that professor's agreements under fear of liability for unjust enrichment and other abuse of power type of laws -- and his tenure was revoked. And, ta dah -- the Chair of the department adjusted my grade.
But, I did happily sign a LIMITED license for the University to use my program free-of-charge on that specific project --- when I was asked, explained what it was to be used for, and treated with the respect that just because I was an undergrad doesn't mean they have everything and I have nothing.
That being said -- clearly it's not automatic that the school gets rights to the work, nor can you be forced to assign rights unless the school exchanged something for them (or it was a condition of admission, etc.). But, obviously there needs to be SOME wiggle room to allow academic growth (should I be able to sue because my professor gave my paper to someone else because he thought it was either really good or really bad and it wasn't implied he would be sharing them?)
It all comes down to respect and asking permission, if you ask me. Given the option of 1- using Turnitin and getting a grade quicker and not having to submit rough drafts, research, etc. -- or 2- Submitting 2 rough drafts and documentation of research with your paper --- most students would probably use Turnitin. But they've been given a fair choice in my example, and if they disagree with Turnitin's policies they are free to not use it.
Just a thought...
If the TurnItIn system is continuously appending its database with data from each new student paper on every common curriculum topic, won't there eventually come a point where the limited availability of word combinations and phrases will become so great that it becomes impossible to submit any paper on a particular topic without it getting flagged as plagiarized?
There are only so many ways one can write statements that are factually correct without it becoming a rube-goldberg contest of words... growing ever longer each year as previous rube-goldberg'ed papers become logged.
I predict TurnItIn will suddenly find themselves being dropped like a lead weight from school after school as using their system eventually costs more in man-hours than simply checking the papers by hand the first time around.
A more intelligent way for TurnItIn to function, would be to drop student works from the database entirely, and focus on professional publications only. Then, leave it up to the schools to figure out a system to compare student works against previous student works per curriculum topic. A prunning of previous works after about 3 years of age should be sufficient in avoiding any meaningful plagerism.
8==8 Bones 8==8
The abuse of Wikipedia is far and wide and widely reported. As a result many universities are banning its use in class. The general reliance on Wikipedia for factual information is staggering - just because its easy to search doesn't mean it is accurate information. Instead of the abusive Turnitin service, universities should simply scan papers against the Wikipedia database and this would find 90% of all plagarism.
I'm just here for the sigs
This seems to be confusing among academics, so let me simplify it for you. That's because "faculty and research staff" are glorified names for "employees", while "students" is a glorified name for "customers". Starting to make sense, yet?
Imagine if I tried to claim ownership of my customers' work. I'm sure that would go over reallllll welllll. On the other hand, it's very common in pretty much 99% of the working world for the employer to own the products that its employees produce.
Do you have ESP?
>The problem with that is false positives.
What if it's your own work that your next work is being compared against? If that shows a positive match for some reason related to your individual writing style (or maybe you actually did copy yourself, that's acceptable in most instances), yet some ham-handed practice flags you for cheating. If that happened and you could prove it, screw copyright. Sue for billions.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
If I write a term paper and my professor uses this system. What happens if I do further research and polish up my paper for another class? It's my work I should be able to use it, reuse it, publish it, or line my birdcage with it if I choose to. I do not assign exclusive rights over to my professor.
Note: It is not work for hire that's why they don't pay you for it.
Technically speaking, anyone can enter into a contract with a minor. However, such practices are strongly recommended against. Why?
Because minors have "presumed incapacity" under civil law. This means they may disaffirm the contract before they gain capacity (e.g. reach the age of majority) and for a reasonable length of time (usually 3-6 months) afterwards.
Once a minor has reached the age of majority, they may ratify a contract. In doing so, they discard their right to disaffirm the contract. Ratification can happen in one of several ways: explicitly (via words) or implicitly (by allowing a reasonable length of time to pass, continuing to execute the contract for a reasonable time, or by making multiple payments).
If a minor disaffirms the contract, they must return their consideration (regardless of its condition) to the other party. The other party must return all consideration (e.g. full restitution) to the minor (regardless of what they get back). There are a bunch of little tweaks that the law applies to minors, depending on the situation. However, they don't apply to this situation.
If the student enables the teacher to act as his or her agent, then the teacher may assent to the contract in place of the student. It's been almost 6 years since I left public school. God knows what they make kids do these days.
It doesn't. You cannot assent to a contract you have not seen.
And now my two cents: Disregarding what was said above, the students may be able to argue that they entered into the contract under duress. Failing the course and thus failing a grade could be reasonably interpreted as an imminent threat to their well being. They have no reasonable choice but to submit the paper to this service. Imminent threat to well being + no reasonable alternative = duress. QED. With this argument, capacity doesn't exist, and the contract once again becomes voidable.
Disclaimer: IANAL. Don't be an idiot; hire an attorney instead of taking this text as legal advice.
The definition of "cheating" can make a big difference. Does copying a math proof count? Collaboration was encouraged in my first year physics, but if it hadn't been would it be considered cheating? How many indcidents are required, over what period of time? Did they ask university students whether they had ever cheated, and include asking the previous class about the quiz back in grade 10?
I would also want to know the relationship between "cheating" and plagiarism. I have heard of professors who consider missing references or footnotes as plagiarism, even if it's accidental - but I don't think anyone would call that cheating.
I'm not saying you're wrong; I've heard cheating and plagiarism are rampant. I have some doubts about the significance of this. When I was a TA, I marked a paper which seemed very suspect to me - the language was inconsistent and too academic (i.e. impenetrable). We didn't prove it was plagiarism, but it wasn't all that good anyway - it didn't do a very good job of fulfilling the requirements of the assignment.
The real problem, if you ask me, is an industrial model of education which fails to truly connect with students. If eduction is turning a 300-student class into 300 numbers, there are going to be problems whether or not there's cheating involved. Unfortunately, better education is expensive, so there's no ideal solution unless we seriously restructure the relationship between society and education.
If plagiarism absolutely must be a priority, my off-the-top solution would be to make the students open up their work (just as academics should be doing). Don't put it in a corporate archive - put it online where anyone can read it. If the students are good, everyone can benefit from their work and the publicity may help their careers. If they plagiarize, that may catch up with them. On the other hand, this makes it very hard for students to move past foolishness or indiscretions, and may reduce risk-taking.
Then if were to point a finger towards one of my classmates and accuse them of cheating to a professor but the professor couldn't prove anything, I would have to see that classmate every day, take classes with them and might even be forced to collaborate with them on projects during the rest of my University career. That would make me think twice before calling someone a cheater without having good evidence (such as a specific website they bought the paper from and so on.)
If they were to bust anyone for cheating they should look really closely at frat boys and sorority girls. Fraternities and sororities usually maintain loads of previously solved homeworks and exams to help the newcomers "get through" college while being drunk half of the time. But if I was to tell a professor that "Ms. Blondie McParty" told her friends she cheated and I overheard, it would be my word against that of 20 clones "Ms. Blondie McParty" and friends. I think I would rather not bother and move on. My children will have to deal the a shitty educational system...
Two papers I wrote as a phd student are now behind pay for access portals, where they charge $30 for a single copy, or a subscription.
Do I get a penny of this? Nope, and do I get free access as the Author? Nope.
Nor are you entitled to that, regardless of whether you hold the copyright. The copyright only applies to the text, tables, and figures you submitted, not the typeset and printed pages that the journal produces. Authors of books and magazine articles often retain the copyrights to their works, but many of them don't get free copies of their books or articles. That said, many academic journals provide authors with a certain number of reprints. Apparently not the one you were published in....
Did they ask for my permission? Nope.
Sure they did, and you granted it when you agreed to let them publish it. You did give them permission to publish it, didn't you? If you wanted to get paid for it, you should have submitted it to a publication that pays its authors. Academic publications generally don't do that, though, and I suspect you knew that when you chose to publish there. Presumably, the value you received from publishing without compensation was greater than the value you would have received from publishing elsewhere or not publishing at all -- otherwise, why did you let them publish it?
Its the standard way papers are distributed in the academic world. I think it's unfair as it stands, although I recognise they have some need to recoup their storage/indexing costs.
Why is it unfair? Academic journals have a small audience interested in reading their publications and ethical considerations that prohibit them from accepting advertising. Furthermore, they have an enormous pool of authors who are willing to provide them content without compensation (because for those authors, publishing is a means to an end, not a living unto itself). They have absolutely no incentive to pay you or give you anything for free, and a rather large disincentive to do so. I happen to think there are a lot of things wrong with academic publishing, but this is not one of them. The more they have to give to their authors, the fewer papers they can afford to publish and the harder it will be to get published. If your graduation is delayed because you're having a hard time getting published, that's going to cost you a whole lot more than you would ever get in compensation for your paper.
As for the true scope of the permissions you granted them, if they published your article then I'm certain you and/or your co-author(s) signed something granting them permission to do so (or otherwise provided legally binding consent). If not, they had no right to publish the article in the first place. I also suspect that if you read the fine print wherever your consent is recorded that you granted them all rights to the article, as academic journals typically require. That means that not only did you give them permission to publish the article, but you also assigned the copyright on the article to the publisher. That means they can do with it as they wish, including publishing it elsewhere without your permission. It also means that if you ever want to re-publish the article elsewhere (even your own dissertation), you need to ask the original publisher for permission even though you are the author. Don't like it? Don't assign them all rights. Sure, that means they probably won't publish it, but when they've got 10 other people willing to take your place in the journal why should they care?
By the way, it's not just academic authors who have to deal with this -- there are a fair number of mainstream publications that will only buy all rights. Of course, they buy them, meaning the authors are monetarily compensated, but then they're dealing with professional writers and attempting to attract an entirely different sort of author than academic journals are. Magazines with high-quality articles, of course, tend to pay well and agree to buy one-time publication rights only because that's what attracts the best writers, but the academic market is a completely different story.
More importantly, he likely did give credit to the original author, himself. There wouldn't be much point in handling in the exercise otherwise.
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
good thing they didn't have this when I was in school. I wrote 5 or 6 papers freshman year and just rewrote them every semester. It would be a PITA arguing over the ethics of plagiarising myself every semester. Politics of West Africa => Foreign Policy of West Africa => Economic Development Case Study: Nigeria => Anthropology: Cultures of West Africa. I had a couple different series that made up about half my coursework, with each paper in a series changed 20 to 50%. In the end I probably spent more time on the remixes than I would have if I had written brand new papers. I also learned more, as I forced myself to build connections across different fields of study. A lot more enlightening than copying my class notes and picking random quotes from one or two sources (or 10 sources that say the same thing from the same point of view). Would my anthro teacher fail me if he knew my application of post-colonial philosophy to an analysis of race in America was cribbed from a previous political theory class? Or would I have kept the A? Only the way it was cheating was that it prevented the first excruciating hour of writer's block.
"work for hire" my big hairy ass. I don't pay fifty grand for the opportunity to work. My ideas are pretty worthless, but they aren't of negative value. Tuition/housing at my alma mater is now over 50k a year. Nucking futs. Great gyms, half a dozen starbucks, neat course bulletin boards, and an amazing student union. Unfortunately, all the profs are overworked/underpaid adjuncts and the student union is actually used for corporate conferences.
Would a ruling in favor of the students affect search engines? Real question, I don't know.
If a professor needs to use this system to detect plagiarism, the students are getting a crappy education. One or a combination of the following are probably true: a) the professor can't read.
b) the professor doesn't read the papers.
c) the professor has no idea who the students are and their capabilities. If the dumbass star athlete turns in genius work, or for that matter the brilliant nerd turns in trite bullshit, questions should be asked.
d) there is no opportunity for discussion among/between students and faculty. Most of these problems could be avoided with smaller classes, which would be possible if so much money wasn't thrown at higher ed leaches like plagiarism detection.
That's perfect. I have a project coming up for a class on 20th Century American Rock and Pop music (Music 109 at the University of Arizona) which is required to be submitted on Turnitin.com. It's a song analysis. I could very easily put large chunks, possibly the entire lyrics of the song into my analysis; I'd like to see what Turnitin.com claims on that. I wonder if I'll get accused of "plagiarism" for copying the song lyrics of the song that I'm analyzing. I think it would be really obvious to the teacher that I wouldn't actually be plagiarizing... but I'm not sure I'd accomplish much else.
Hah can you say OWNED
Another question is what happens if someone appends an EULA to a paper??? Shrink-wrap the thing or even just append it to the end... Wouldn't that beat any such "contract under duress"?
And why haven't there been any class-actions against school districts filed by some parents over the forced nature of giving up one's own copyrights? It's difficult for one student to be a martyr, but if all of them in a district are pulled into a class-action, wouldn't that make the case easier???
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
Kinda, the contract exists at the sole discretion of the minor. The minor can void the contract at his will for any reason, for this reason it's usually called a void contract. But this doesn't go the other way, if the Minor wishes to enforce the conract they can.
The school is forcing students to agree to turnitin's rules. I assume there is an agreement giving turnitin the rights to use the paper when submitted? If not, this is definitely not fair use. Its a commercial application. But if there are terms and students are submitting to their work under these rules, turnitin shouldn't be at fault. The school should be sued. The question will be is the school allowed to force a student to write something and give away the rights to the work to anyone the school wants when submitting for a grade. I assume it will be the schools right to do that and these students will lose.
Most established journals make all authors sign a copyright agreement that gives the journal publication rights. For example, here is what Science says about copyright:
To even get your paper published, you probably had to sign a similar agreement, otherwise they will refuse to publish your paper. I know that I've had to sign one for each of my papers so far. So, yes, you probably did give them permission to charge people to view your paper.
Note that you still retain the copyright on your paper, and the code you released under the GPL is still protected by the GPL. But they have a permanent license to publish that document, and charge for it, without owing you a cent.
but they also have a web spider that ignores robots.txt and will happily leech your entire site, copyrighted or not.
Turnitin is a search engine much like Google or Yahoo. If you forbid Turnitin to index files, you'll have to shut down Google as well.
.
If you want your text publicly available on the Web but not in Turnitin (a strange combination, I think, who would want to be plagiarized), use robots.txt. Turnitin has visited my site regularly. The crawler's host name was always cr1.turnitin.com or cr2.turnitin.com, its user agent string "TurnitinBot/2.1 (http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html)"
As the Google case unfolds with Viacom,, there's a lot to hope precedent gets set, that a prompt response to a valid DMCA takedown notice will get any service company 'off the hook'.
It's those nasty, viscious holders of the copyright to blame again; except this time the're students.
Yeah, that. You don't get statutory damages or attorney's fees, or something like that, right? So they'd have to show actual damages, which seems rather pointless here. Mea culpa.
Turnitin supporters, read this article:
m l
http://www.essayfraud.org/turnitin_john_barrie.ht
If you can STILL support Turnitin after reading the facts, you probably need psychological intervention.
This is one of the few things Universities are really doing to prepare students for the corporate world. Let the laying down of rights begin.
All in all, I think this boils down to the university's involvement with the service. When I was getting my a degree in industrial design I learned that the university had the right to republish anything that I designed for a school assignment. I wouldn't be surprised if publication rights were a fairly standard thing for most universities and disciplines.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Not to mention that unless the student was over the age of 18, any contract he/she signed would be utterly unenforceable.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I work in a school district (a Canadian one at that). I've never seen any such contracts. Furthermore, who would be the ones submitting the material? Teachers of individual classes, principals? My experience has been that many teachers - while definitely knowledgeable within their own domain - often lack knowledge of outside factors. I've met plenty of Math teachers who can't spell, English teachers with poor math skills, so it wouldn't be a surprise if teachers would upload this material without checking the further legal ramifications.
That said, Principals and administrators are often more aware of legal issues, at least in terms of avoiding something that will get a school sued, but the technology angle of this might make it a bit elusive, and plenty of teachers might be submitting students' work to the database without checking with the admin-types first...
Can you actually view the whole book? An argument there would be that google has presented a service which would actually be profitable to the author (by selling more books). It tends to go along with the argument that if students' works are being submitted, the students should in some way get compensated.
Still, it is a good comparison, and one that is still up-in-the-air as well.
If this goes through, I predict either
a. a step up for rights of minors in schools
or
b. a push by the teacher's unions to revise copyright law
So far, every comment I have read has been resting on the assumption that something wrong is happening. I think what Turnitin does it great - they catch people who cheat, which (relatively) helps the students who don't cheat. They have created a service that applies some pretty cool research in machine learning, and are paying honest programmers and researchers in the process (perhaps this is my bias as a machine learning researcher). They help teachers do their job, without interfering with the creative or subjective process of the teachers grading.
The only thing that could be construed as "wrong" in all this is that the students' papers are being added to a database. I don't find this to be a very valid complaint. The company is not stealing their papers, it is making sure no one copies them. Companies employ this kind of pattern all the time in our daily lives - every time you search in google, they record what you searched for along with plenty of other contextual clues (including what sites you visited). These records aren't being "stolen" or published, they are used to improve the service. Likewise, these students papers aren't being published, they are being added to a machine learning database to improve the service in the future.
I understand the intuition that something is wrong, but I think deeper thought shows that in the long run this is pretty win-win.
I have been FORCED to use this in high shcool and it is a huge infringement on our rights. When your kids or friends tell you school is communist WELL IT IS!
Well I am not really going to weigh in on the issue, but I can tell you one thing about the service.. it's pretty damn good. I actually am friends with a teacher at Westfields High School in Northern Virginia. Almost every assignment that's submitted electronically or by way of .DOC files ends up in this system. He logged in and showed it to me. It will tell you the percentage of the document that matches another from a school or from the textbook. It's pretty cool. It will even highlight and color code the match set of words or sentences and tell you where it came from.
Now whether or not you like them adding the text to the database. That's another story and I honestly do not care one way or another. What I can tell you is that this service is pretty damn cool[/useful].
Any new employee(or intern) has to sign an employee agreement that pretty much says everything the person writes, thinks or produces belongs to 'the company'. Wouldn't this supersede the school since it was signed first? If so, start a company.
First, there's no need to talk to other people here like that. We can all participate in a mutually interesting and informative conversation without the namecalling.
How long do you think it will be until Turnitin's database is published (even inadvertantly) and your papers are indexed by the world's search engines, giving your future employers something new to look at? Do you think other high school students are prepared for that kind of scrutiny?
While I'm sure grading a lot of papers is difficult work, I wonder if there aren't some adverse privacy consequences to a service like TurnItIn that outweigh the alleged advantages.
Digital Citizen
This case illustrates terrible misunderstandings that are almost universal now about copyright. Turnitin does not *publish* ANYTHING!! If the students really have copyright on their works (not automatic, they had to jump through lots of hoops), then noone else can PUBLISH them. Copyright law has nothing to say about who can and cannot profit, in some ambiguous way, from any work.
Imagine that this suit is successful. Now Pandora will have to pay royalties every time they compare some users taste to some song in their database, whether they stream it to that user or not. The royalties will be for any use of any kind by Pandora, not for streaming (ie. publishing) the song.
Or here's a further out example: I go to a job interview and I make a quote from George Orwell's '1984' that impresses my prospective boss and I get the job. Now I should have to pay for copyright infringement because when I bought the book I only had the right to read it, not to profit from reading it?
This lawsuit is pure BS, and a publicity stunt by these students.
You cannot even be party to a contract until you achieve majority.
Maybe not, but your parents or guardians can. If you think they got you a raw deal, wait until you're eighteen and sue them.This is not my sandwich.
plagiarism is turning in research work that is not original for the assignment. When you turn in your own paper again, it's not original work for THAT assignment. This petty thing about ownership has nothing to do with it. it's a ego-building power grab by school management.
Does anyone know, does turnitin have copyright releases for any of the published sources it compares against? It seems like turnitin's potential exposure as a result of litigation by students is nothing compared to their potential exposure as a result of litigation by publishers.
If you release your work under the GPL, anyone can distribute your work according to the terms of the GPL, and they can charge for doing so. It's just that they have no right to prevent others from distributing your work for free or for profit.
Now, if the pay-for-access portal tries to state that there are more stringent restrictions on distribution, I can see where you would have a problem with that insofar as the work was released to them under the GPL and that you did not agree to a different license. However, that issue is totally separate from whether they are charging for distribution.
Uh... that's called plagiarising yourself. The uni i go to has a clause that says submitting work that you have already submitted before will be considered plagiarism.
(it's high school, what are the odds that it's worth copyrighting?).
So, does that mean that the teenager who built the cheap spectrograph for under $500 recently would lose all rights to it?
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
Hello, I am new to turnitin.com and I am curious about something. I have read the turnitin's privacy pledge, the End User License Agreement, the usage policy, and the Privacy and Copyright pdf document. I have not found anywhere on this site anything that begins to address the question of the ownership of papers that are turned in to turnitin.com. I find this to be terribly frightening. I believe your companies documentation when it says that "turnitin.com does not violate any state or federal laws" but at the same time the only thing that seems to maintain that point is the fact that the company doesn't address the issue of ownership of intellectual property. For instance the company obviously retains ownership of my work for the purpose of comparing it to the work of other students, however your site never explicitly states this fact. You never say that when I turn in my document you reserve ownership rights to my work. You never as far as I can find explicitly state that I retain full ownership of my work. You explicitly make no provisions whatsoever for the protection of my intellectual property through your end user license agreement. So, my question basically rests at whether I can have my work completely withdrawn from your database after it has been checked and determined to be original? It is after all my work and not yours and it is a requirement that I use your service to pass my class, so surely you must provide a way for me to protect my own rights as an original author?
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
I doubt that the school's policy is about copyright vs. fair use. It's about academic credit.
Most schools have a policy against receiving academic credit for the same work more than once. If you submit a paper for one class, and then submit the same paper for another class...it's not really doing any work the second time, and how much are you really learning?
If the student already received academic credit, "he simply turned in what he had done for the same assignment the prior semester (for which he had scored well)" (grandparent, 2007), then he should not be entitled to credit for the same work a second time.
---jjj.
Students can place the following disclaimer on their papers:
m l
"Copyright 2006 [STUDENT NAME]. All Rights Reserved. Aside from my professor's sole, personal review as part of his/her private, single-human, software-free grading process (checking for plagiarism with Google is acceptable), neither my professor nor my academic institution may otherwise copy, transfer, distribute, reproduce, publicly/privately perform, publicly/privately claim, publicly/privately display, or create derivative works (including "digital fingerprints") of my copyrighted document (intellectual property). The same restrictions apply to Turnitin.com and all similar services if my document should somehow come into their possession. Neither my professor nor my academic institution may submit my copyrighted document, in whole or in part, to be copied, transformed, manipulated, altered, or otherwise used by or stored at Turnitin.com (iParadigms, LLC) or any other physical or electronic database or retrieval system without my personal, explicit, voluntary, uncoerced, written permission. Regardless of supposed intent (e.g., "to create a digital fingerprint"), no part of my copyrighted document may be temporarily or permanently transferred, by any party, to Turnitin.com or any other service, program, database, or system for analysis, comparison, storage, or any other purpose whatsoever. Violators will be monetarily punished to the fullest extent allowed by the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and/or international law."
http://www.essayfraud.org/turnitin_john_barrie.ht
Unless the research is from government funding. All of my funding comes from the NSF or NIST, and since the money is taxpayer's money research that comes from it cannot be copywritten. So in addition to giving the Journal the transfer-of-copyright form, I also send them a form that says technically I have no copyright to transfer to them.
This is very interesting -- I've always thought that this should be how it works, but I wasn't clear whether Government-funded research went into the public domain or what. It certainly seems like nothing but a big fat handout to the journal publishers, if billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded research are just turned over to them by scientists trying to get their papers in print.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
As was discussed elsewhere, they'd require you to sign away copyright to whatever you turned in as a condition of taking the course - no-one is forcing you to enroll, thus no duress.
I think the greater question is if at a public highschool, when completing your legally-mandated education, can a teacher/professor compel a student to use such a service (and thereby surrender the right to their intellectual property) as a condition of receiving a passing grade in the course?
I think to really establish a case, some students are going to have to flatly refuse to use Turnitin, and wait for a teacher to flunk them in a course that's required in order to graduate (most English classes are, or at least they were back when I was in school). I think there might be some precedent surrounding what schools can require students to do in order to let them graduate, as a result of cases surrounding high-stakes exit exams, perhaps.
It seems to me that you could construct an argument that a public school teacher saying that 'you must use this service or you'll fail the course and not graduate' (when, remember, you don't have any option to be in the class or not, if you're under 18 anyway) counts as duress.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Have you ever actually used this service? What was that? No? I didn't think so.
I'm another high school senior (one of my classmates posted earlier up) who has used this service since my sophmore year. Every time, I have submitted the paper personally. For emphasis, this means that THE STUDENTS SUBMIT THE PAPERS. Each student registers an account with Turnitin, signs up for "classes" (which gives teachers the ability to see the report on the paper), and submits the papers themselves. All the teacher does is check the reports that Turnitin mails them. Thus, every student who uses this service has already commited to an EULA/TOS. I'll repeat that. EVERY STUDENT who has used this service HAS SIGNED AN EULA.
Sorry for cap-spamming, but this point has not come across to many readers, so I felt the need to re-iterate strongly.
Students can place the following disclaimer on their papers:
m l
"Copyright 2007 [STUDENT NAME]. All Rights Reserved. Aside from my professor's sole, personal review as part of his/her private, single-human, software-free grading process (checking for plagiarism with Google is acceptable), neither my professor nor my academic institution may otherwise copy, transfer, distribute, reproduce, publicly/privately perform, publicly/privately claim, publicly/privately display, or create derivative works (including "digital fingerprints") of my copyrighted document (intellectual property). The same restrictions apply to Turnitin.com and all similar services if my document should somehow come into their possession. Neither my professor nor my academic institution may submit my copyrighted document, in whole or in part, to be copied, transformed, manipulated, altered, or otherwise used by or stored at Turnitin.com (iParadigms, LLC) or any other physical or electronic database or retrieval system without my personal, explicit, voluntary, uncoerced, written permission. Regardless of supposed intent (e.g., "to create a digital fingerprint"), no part of my copyrighted document may be temporarily or permanently transferred, by any party, to Turnitin.com or any other service, program, database, or system for analysis, comparison, storage, or any other purpose whatsoever. Violators will be monetarily punished to the fullest extent allowed by the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and/or international law."
http://www.essayfraud.org/turnitin_john_barrie.ht
every time you search in google, they record what you searched for along with plenty of other contextual clues (including what sites you visited).
And even though you're talking about a record that is arguably not your intellectual property in the first place (any more than an inventory of your trash is), Google's already been in hot water for keeping this in a form that's personally identifiable and is changing their policies.
Maybe you missed something, or I was unclear, but I was saying that a normalization procedure that doesn't create a lot of competition is a good thing. Somehow, you seem to have read it as the reverse.
Obviously, a grading schema (such as the "forced curve," which I gave an example of, and I understand used to be pretty common in medical schools) which creates an artificial scarcity of 'A' grades and creates competition between students for them, where they attempt to undermine each other, is bad. It's hugely counterproductive, unless your goal is to turn out sociopaths, and I'd seriously question any educator today who did it. (Unless they were doing it for pedagogical reasons, somehow.)
But normalizing grades is common, because it helps to compensate for factors outside students' and professors' control; my point was that a good normalization procedure also discourage students from allowing people to cheat off of them, but doesn't create the same sort of cutthroat competition that force-curving does.
As other people have pointed out, although collaboration is obviously a critically important skill in today's world (and job market), you're not doing anyone any favors when you help someone who's plainly unqualified to get a grade they don't deserve: you're only creating competition for yourself and other qualified people down the road, and you may bring your field (or your alma mater) into disrepute via their shoddy performance later, which could have negative consequences. And you don't really help them in the long run, because they'll probably just end up over their head someday, when what they don't know catches up to them.
There's a key difference between collaboration and allowing someone who's nothing but dead weight to copy off your answer sheet; in the former case, a team can be greater than the sum of its parts, but in the latter, a solid worker and a cheater are worse than the solid worker by herself.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What if someone does a good job on a paper, and then releases it under the GPL, Creative Commons, or Public Domain?
Perhaps I should put a disclaimer on my term papers that releases them directly into the public domain. Copy away, I don't care. (it seems hypocritical to me that children are encouraged to share in elementary school and then the same system tries to hammer copyright propaganda into them later)
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
No it isn't. By definition, plagiarism is presenting someone else's work as your own. You fundamentally cannot plagiarize yourself.
The school and the professor may have a point that repeating a class requires putting the same level of effort into the class, but the efficiency-seeking nerd in me doesn't like that argument.
I would go along with the students, as long as the students pay the RIAA 10^x dollars, where x represent the number of songs in their possession that were not specifically bought on the same media on which the students listen to said music.
1. I don't know where you live, but in the US it's not against the law to "Rip, Mix, and Burn" your own copies of works... so long as you don't redistribute them. If there was any doubt about that Apple wiped it out in 2002... remember the RIAA whining about their "Rip, Mix, Burn" ad campaign? Remember them in the end conceding that it was legal if you didn't give the CD to someone else?
2. Your presumption that every college student has copies of music they are not entitled to is odious.
Before you start pontificating about what's "sauce for the goose", learn to cook.
If students successfully sue TurnItIn, this will likely open the road for other students to sue schools and individual professors for contributory-copyright-infringement. I suspect that schools and universities will want to avoid litigation, and either encourage professors to not require it's use, or TurnItIn will offer opt-out path for those who use their service.
Of course, this is just my feeling on the whole matter.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
That's a weird argument. My undergrad school just has a policy that double-submission (either submitting previous work, or submitting the same new work for two classes) requires approval (from both instructors), and counts as cheating if you do it without approval.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I have to wonder how Turnitin handles citations/bibliographies (works cited). So I've got a blob in the middle of my paper that is a direct quote from somewhere and so Turnitin flags my paper and I get expelled. Only after fighting the 'never wrong' computer system and the administration do they notice that I properly footnoted and/or cited the 'plagiarized' work.
Sure thats an exaggeration, but it must be possible. If in an assignment where citations are frequent and/or required, every single cite must be hand verified, then turnitin has no purpose anyway.
Turnitin's EULA really does say: "ALL YOUR COMMUNICATIONS ARE BELONG TO US", but it adds: "excluding any papers submitted"... Look for yourself: http://turnitin.com/static/pdf/Usage_Policy.pdf . Sigh. It's so easy to check, nobody is checking, everyone is talking...
IANAL yadda yadda, of course, but I'm pretty sure that contracts (including EULAs and TOS's) are invalid if signed or otherwise agreed to under duress, among other reasons. If the student is required to submit their work to Turnitin or get a zero on the assignment, wouldn't that count as duress? If so, the students here ought to have a valid argument against Turnitin despite any attempted ass-covering by the latter.
On the other hand, Turnitin can probably argue back that they weren't the ones causing the duress and so shouldn't get the blame. I doubt that would hold water in the end (they've got to be aware of the fact that some universities require the use of their service--who knows, maybe they even suggested it themselves), but it could make things messy in the meantime.
So? Here's turnitin's EULA: http://turnitin.com/static/pdf/Usage_Policy.pdf. It explicitly excludes submitted papers from the transfer of ownership requirement.
IANAL, but doesn't that just mean "You don't have to transfer copyright to us, but you have to give us permission to publish it so you can't sue us for infringement later?"
Can I get a "Duh?"
There is an excellent legal analysis in another paper at turnitin site: http://turnitin.com/static/pdf/us_Legal_Document.p df . They indeed are relying on Fair Use doctrine...
Almost certainly the $45 is for registering the copyright. Last I heard, $45 was the going registration fee. Those numbers seem suspiciously similar :P
Actually, no. The government in the US can not take without compensation under the umbrella of eminent domain. They must compensate for what they take. Its a Fifth Amendment protection. The recent Supreme Court ruling was merely that "public use" could be "this corporation is going to generate revenues, which we can tax, and thus provide services to the public".
Of course, given that sort of SCOTUS ruling, receiving a grade may be considered just compensation. I'd call that sort of thing extortion myself, but hey I'm just a student. What do I know.
I don't expect morality, equality, consistency, or justice from the law. I expect only legality.
Darn you and your calm and correct answers.
Foiled again..
If they don't have a problem handing over 15 private residences to Pfizer, I doubt they'd have any problem reappropriating the contents of college students' essays to Turnitin. It's a brave ne[w|ocon] world we're living in.
It was the liberal judges (Stevens, Breyer, Ginsberg, Souter) and wishy-washy Kennedy who sided with the city. The conservatives (Rhenquist, Scalia, Long Dong) and wishy-washy O'Connor sided with the homeowners.
IANAL, so forgive me if this is obvious to some... but is this covered by copyright?
Turnitin isn't reprinting the works, or selling the works, which is what
copyright covers. The works are sitting on their machines in a database. The profit
being derived isn't from a re-sale of copyrighted work, but from a relational database
service. This seems to be fair use to me (as much as they'd piss me off if I were still
a student).
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Um, guys, I thought copyright was, like, evil and stuff. Something that only big greedy corporations want to keep. Information wants to be free and stuff.
Their case is actually weaker because they knew what was going to happen -- one could presumably argue that they implicitly licensed their work to be stored and used for that purpose, in the same way as you implicitly license it to be cached by Google if you put it on a website.
As someone who is currently doing a course for a second time and almost had a similar opportunity (teacher changed the assignment instead), that is completely fucked up.
By the way, based on the teacher's marking criteria I'm almost guaranteed (as in, I'd be very surprised if I don't get one) a distinction and I've spent 5-7 hours on it. An extra 2 hours and I may get a high distinction (more then that I have no idea what I could possibly do on this assignment). Which is ridiculous, but because I've already learnt this work, I can do it so easily that there has been no benefit in me doing this assignment. Therefore, I (and other people in my situation) should be able to hand in prior assignments we've done the work on.
Besides, if universities don't want students handing in work they've already done, they should change the assignment (as mine was in this case).
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Students were living in monasteries at dormitories reminding prisons, were beaten up for a tiny disobedience and that produced excellent results. I wish I was punished for every stupid thing I did.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The overall issue is probably not that text snippets are cut from existing works, the problem lies in the case that texts from other sources are missing the reference. Omissions may still exists, sometimes they aren't intentional and sometimes it may appear as a copy, but it isn't since the writer happens to write in the same wording as another text has.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
My uni doesn't let you in without signing their terms & conditions; one of which is approximately "all your work are belong to us". Don't most places do this?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
For staff, the policy is: but any material that is not 'scholarly material' (teacing materials, lecture notes, etc) is owned by the University.
Hmm... it's not entirely without value to check a rough draft. The simple and sad fact is that with standards in high schools and universities having slipped as far as they have, an increasing number of students don't actually have a firm idea of what plagiarism actually constitutes, the harm it does and the consequences it can bring.
It's much better to pick up accidental or unwitting plagiarism at any early stage than when the final paper is submitted. Pick it up early enough and often a quiet (or not so quiet, if you want to go for shock value) word with the student in question can fix the problem, educate the student and avoid any severe consequences. By contrast, plagiarism in a final, submitted paper is always (rightly) going to bring extremely harsh sanctions.
If the system were working properly, it would be capable of excluding a student's own earlier work from the check.
I recently had my students (first year community college class) submit a rough draft of their research paper so that I could check it.
Only five or so of them even had any form of Works Cited page. Several of them thought that they could simply include the URL of the source they used as a citation (often in inappropriate places).
The very first paper I graded was text from two web pages pasted together in succession, with the URL following each section - and nothing else. No original writing on the student's part at all.
If you're trying to cheat, you don't include the URL of the web page you're completely ripping off.
I'm a hiring manager in a Fortune 500 company.
Yes, we expect a degree, unless you're so incredibly smart that you can produce without one. (And almost all of you who think that you are that smart are simply wrong. Formal education tends to give you the foundation on which all technology is built, and it's rare to find someone who 'gets it' without going to college.)
No, we DO NOT CARE where you went to school, as long as it's accredited. What we care about is:
a) Can you do the technical work we need done?
b) Can you communicate clearly? (Orally and in writing.)
c) Are you decently groomed? (So that others are not made uncomfortable by your appearance.)
d) Do you know when to SHUT UP? (Being right about a technical issue is nice, but just because you are right you don't have the freedom to tell people they are idiots.)
e) Can you see the big picture? (Sometimes there is considerable business value in building something other than the "perfect" solution, and we want to be able to pay you to build something technically "lame" because it's the best way for us to make more money.)
f) Are you a leader in your chosen field? Are you willing to learn leadership in a broader sense?
We can always hire someone who knows how to flip bits. We are looking for people who can flip bits and be tolerable to be around. There are plenty of technically competent jerks who think they know it all. We'll let others have them, and we'll hire the people who are smart in more than one area.
The key is turning brainpower into systems and applications that make the company cheaper to run or facilitate making more money. That's what we care about. We don't care where your parchment came from.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
You bit, too. He's comparing the students to the MPAA/RIAA...
Best Slashdot Co
No shit sherlock. Thats the way it is at universities around here, which is what I wrote the first time. Perhaps you should have directed your explanation at someone who wasn't saying the same thing as you were.
Some people will do anything for a buck, and then defend whatever sleaziness it entails. I bet these guys' parents work for Macrovision. Not that I think plagiarists should get away with it. Unfortunately, those with the means can just buy a term paper rather than copy one. Where's the Gestapo cracking down on that business? GWB paid them off? Or is that another service offered by the paper-copying detectives? It would make sense, profit-wise, to lower the boom on copying, drive more cheaters to buy papers, and then sell to them.
I suspect that such a "service" as TurnItIn would fair better claiming fair use if they merely kept bits and pieces of works submitted for future comparison than if they used the whole documents. Still sounds like shaky ground, if my understanding of fair use is reasonably accurate.
As you see, you not only give them permission to publish, but also to distribute and create derivative works, for as long as the copyright is valid.
The rest of the agreement goes on to outline the rights retained by the author, which includes reprinting it for using in a thesis, giving oral presentations at conferences, and the like. One notable exception is that you can distribute copies of the work, but only for non-commercial purposes. Another is that you can't publish the final version (as it appears in the magazine) on your own website, though you can publish the accepted version as long as you include a link to the paper on their site.
Speaking from experience, I didn't read this that thoroughly when I had to sign it, but I ended up looking more carefully at it later when I wanted to put the paper on my website. Since I couldn't put the paper itself on my website, I ended up simply including a link to the abstract and noted under it that anyone interested in a copy could e-mail me and I'd send them one, since that's one of the rights I retained.
It isn't infringing for a library to "catalog or index" a work for retrieval because they aren't storing complete copies (generally). If they do store those copies, it is for public use (non-profit) and also they presumably paid for the original work in the first place.
The students "gave a copy" to TurnitIn presumably because they were forced to. Being coerced negates most contract negotiations when it comes to the courts. Ask any defense lawyer how many of their client's confessions were not admissable because of police behavior...and that's criminal activity.
I would guess, though I don't know how Turnitin cites plagiarized works, that Turnitin does in fact send some portion of the plagiarized work back to the professor with the query or how would the professor actually know the work truly was plagiarized? Just citing the work isn't enough to prevent copyright infringement in a case like that, I believe.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
>>Can you see the big picture? (Sometimes there is considerable business value in building something other than the "perfect" solution, and we want to be able to pay you to build something technically "lame" because it's the best way for us to make more money.)
this is sooo true, I am asked to consult a heck of a lot of times to very important people, that run big companies but have the computer skills of 1980. my solutions are often what you say, " not perfect: just working correctly " that lead to basic results that they want. What I do ask them to do is to make a solid foundation to work off of.
good example of this is the UGLY site. most company web sites have only a few goals - that is
a) Branding,
B) Lead generation,
C) Information
branding sites are a pain, since you need to consult marketing and creative and they are generally very slow ( take a look at any top end watch makers site ) very pretty
lead generation sites are easy since it's a light marketing and get the visitor to fill out the form. ugly colors and the person just fills the form and leaves
Information sites are somewhat easy, just a solid design with good logic flow makes it wonderful. ( Google, Granger's catalog ) color wheel usage and clean.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
To say that the teacher cannot make any copies of the work seems drastic to me. Can't the teacher keep previous copies and perhaps check plagarism of current classes against previous classes? Can't a group of teachers teaching the same course combine their copies to check plagarism? If the teacher can do that, turnitin does not seem a big step.
Furthermore, turnitin does not sell or further distribute copies of the student's work, so this does not affect future sales of the work. The loss of sales is probably the most important factor in a fair use argument.
Let me get this straight. Some students, very concerned about their works being copied without their consent, are trying to the best of their efforts to remove said works from a service that prevents them from being copied without their consent. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
I don't know on which classes these guys are "A-grade", but whatever these are, Logics 101 isn't among them.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Curious by why would it be the property of the school? School isn't a job, it's a service. You pay them for a service and your papers are your own work based on a service you paid for that generally is public domain knowledge. It isnt like calculus or Shakespeare has change in the past hundred years. It's really the access to a teacher who can walk you through the info and fill in the gaps you're paying for.
If I ever go back to school, I will give access to my Subversion repository to my professor so she can see all my drafts and revisions.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Go figure!
such as when a student suddenly starts spelling words correctly they have never spelled right all semester,
Your wife must work at a very relaxed University. A single spelling error in an English paper would result in a maximum grade of 59% where I went to school.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
He needs the original source, the one Ben Franklin plagiarized it from.
n .shtml
Don't believe dear old Ben ever plagurized anything? Try this http://www.chiasmus.com/mastersofchiasmus/frankli
for starters.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
First of all, if you're under 18, you can't enter into an enforceable agreement. You can sign whatever you want and nullify it after the fact, so TurnItIn wouldn't be able to rely on agreements that they made with students.
What the school really would need to do is obtain the parents' permission. This is also problematic for the following reasons:
- Signing would be under duress. Child must attend school to not violate truancy laws, parent must sign document for child to attend school. That sounds like duress to me. "Sign this under threat of jail time." Yup, definitely duress.
- Getting things from parents is a pain in the neck. Remember, not all families are 2 parents with the mom staying home to raise the kids, house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, 1 dog and 2.2 kids (I'd hate to be the fractional child). In real life, parents divorce, have joint custody, fight, bicker, and use the children as weapons. What if one parent signs and the other custodial parent refuses? What happens when the refusing parent sues the spouse and drags the school into the lawsuit? Really, this is something that schools will not want to get involved with.
Really, I think TurnItIn is in hot water here.They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Student to TurnItIn: "ALL YOUR AGREEMENT ARE NULL AND VOID. I'M UNDER 18, DIPSHIT."
lower case letters to get past lameness filter...lower case letters to get past lameness filter...lower case letters to get past lameness filter...lower case letters to get past lameness filter...lower case letters to get past lameness filter...
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Thank you. Those rates do sound pretty high, especially the rate of cheating on exams. (Copying homework assignments doesn't surprise me, especially for math and sciences.) Am I right in supposing that an "honor code" school is one in which students are expected to sign on to a code of conduct, or is that a specific program in the U.S.?
Tech workers are grunts, we are talking about succeeding in life. That's great for a tech job where X skill is required to fill holes of Y type. But tech does not cover most of the world and definately not most of the jobs. There are only so many tech jobs to be had. How about in business, counciling, law, psychiatry, medicine?
Say you are a VC looking for a new startup CEO. What do you think the odds are of you hiring a guy with a masters from the University of Pheonix? The only way it would happen is if he was a self-made billionaire.
There can only be so many CEO's and so many avenues to success. It's okay that not everyone can succeed. What isn't okay is that the avenue that leads to success requires a either a golden ticket and a little luck or nothing but luck. Some of us actually want it to take hard work, forethought, and a little luck.
I don't know where you go to school, but I own the copyrights to all my papers, master's thesis and the PhD thesis that I'm wrapping up (soon... very, very soon...) In fact, the standard form of the thesis cover sheet includes my copyright, plus a release form to allow the university to publish it in Dissertation Abstracts, and the National Library Archives. I have published several of my essays as articles in scholarly journals and the copyright is either assigned (yuck) or licensed (better).
The intellectual property rights to certain inventions that are funded by public research money or departmental grants is another matter altogether that goes to patentability and future licensing rights for inventions, but this discussion is about copyright.
None taken. I _know_ I'm no good at managing anyone, but then that's why I didn't go to a management school. It's one of the first things I tell my employer too.
Still, you've piqued my interest. So also not as a flame or anything, just out of genuine curiosity, how should I have went about delegating to, say, my first "sidekick"?
The story is a fairly straightforward one. It started with mostly "ok, so which part do you want to start with?" Ok, so he wants to do the part that plots the graphs. Sure. (I don't think I fucked up _too_ hard so far. After all, whole methodologies, e.g. Extreme Programming, involve people choosing which part they think they need next or would like to do next. But then I may be wrong.)
Some time goes by and I'm getting only hot air from him. "Yeah, I'm working on it" and "yeah, it's almost ready, I just need another week to debug something" and the like. He doesn't want to show me the supposed work so far either, when I offer to help him debug it.
So it gets split down further. "Ok, how about drawing the X and Y axes for that graph? Might as well start with that, just so we have _something_ to show the prof. We can tweak and polish the actual graph drawing afterwards, as time allows." Ok, good idea, he says, he'll get to that ASAP. We're one month before the deadline by now, so it would be high time.
Let's also say at this point that it's such a bloody trivial task, I'd expect anyone to say, "sure, lemme at the keyboard for 5 minutes." I mean, even if you make it configurable to draw extra lines at the hundreds, or logarithmic ticks, and whatever else you can possibly think of, it has no excuse to take more than half an hour tops. It's just bloody trivial, really.
Time goes by, I'm getting more reassuring that he's working on it, he's debugging it, etc. (Hello? For a task that trivial?) A week before the deadline I'm already getting, understandably, impatient. I had had the foresight to do the rest of the graph drawing functions myself in that time, though, so I'm really just waiting for his drawing the bloody X and Y axes. Still, it would be high time to actually get those and see to fitting them into the rest of the program, you know?
I manage to squeeze an, "Oh, I'm just debugging the drawing the ticks and units along the axes, otherwise it's almost ready," out of him. Fine, I say, we can draw just the two lines for now, I'm sure we can smoke the prof as to why there are no numbers and ticks on them. You know, just a vertical line and a horizontal line. How trivial is _that_?
Again, I'd expect a, "sure, lemme at the keyboard for 5 minutes." I mean, ffs, it's only 2 lines, right? I get an, "ok, I'll get right to it." Inquiries in the next days get me more "I'm working on it" and "I'm just debugging it" bullshit. Frankly, I can't imagine anyone spending a week working hard on _that_ task.
A day before the deadline I give up and do that part too, in all its "glory". I.e., with ticks and numbers and everything. Not that it's anything to brag about, really, since you can see how trivial a task _that_ is.
So, umm, what would you advise me to do in _that_ situation?
Bear in mind that I'm not his boss or anything at that point, so it's not like I can fire him for loafing around. So how would I convince him to start working? Beg? Whine? Bribe him? Suck his cock? Sorry about the obscenity, but, just for extreme example sake, I'm doubting that even _that_ would have motivated him.
Should I basically ruin my own grades and reputation by taking the hard line and just waiting for the work that he blatantly hasn't even started? Give up and go to the prof and say I don't want to work with "the great Wally" any more? Even the professor doesn
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
wow, I hope you feel better. You know, there are real people at the other end of these intertube-thingies.
Duly noted, I was only talking about my own field, not yours. I thought that much was obvious, though in retrospect it wasn't. I really should have made it clear.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Why should I believe this?
Um, like, I knew this guy that was fired from his job for stealing, you know, because he had brought in his own pencils, and one day he took a bunch of them home, right, but, um, the company said that he was taking home their property. It's true, my brother's girlfriend's sister knew him.
This stinks of an urban legend: outrageous behavior posted anonymously without identifying any of the parties. Can anyone point to an actual school, that had an actual incident like this?
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
I don't know what you're talking about. I said "almost all of you who think that you are that smart are simply wrong." You may be one of the exceptions to that rule.
I have no idea what you mean when you suggest that the three statements from my original post constitute "twisted logic" They all seem consistent to me... Can you clarify?
I have no fancy pedigree. I'm from a lower-middle-class family, I went to a liberal arts college you've never heard of, and I worked my butt off to get where I am.
Chip on *my* shoulder? Perhaps you're looking at the wrong person's shoulder....
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Just as an extra point, though, you don't need to assume that someone necessarily doubted your coding skills.
A lot of people ending up majoring in anything even remotely computer-related, (A) love to code cool stuff, hence don't really need more reasons to write your part of the code too, and (B) well, don't really need help to solve most college assignments. Those college assignments are generally designed to be at the level of someone who's only now learning that trade in college, not for the level of someone who was doing that kind of stuff, at that level, 4 years ago.
If you will, think getting one of those chemistry engineering problems... when you've been doing that, and more complex stuff, even before high school. I'm sure you're dealing with problems far more complex than that, but for the sake of giving a simple example, think being asked to solve getting salt from HCl and natrium. I'm sure you wouldn't really set up a whole group and delegate parts of it, when it's actually less effort to just solve it by yourself.
For some of us those college assignments were really _that_ trivial. Even if you don't already know the exact algorithm, chances are a short search or a trip to the library are all it takes. But they didn't even need that, they just needed at most having a look through the lecture notes. We're not exactly talking post-grad school there, so they didn't ask anyone to research new stuff, they just wanted to see us able to apply whatever techniques or algorithms or formulas they already taught us. And, again, which a lot of us already knew anyway.
Part of the problem there is, well, the massive disparities in previous experience and skill level between students. If you give homework that would require major research and collaboration for a die-hard geek, you've buried everyone else alive.
I would assume that chemistry has somewhat less of that problem. I would assume there aren't many who've been spending 40+ hours a week doing biochemistry and chemical engineering for fun since they were 12. (But then, it's a wild assumption and I might be wrong.) So it would probably be somewhat easier to gauge the difficulty of a problem so it's challenging for a broader slice of students.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Say you are a VC looking for a new startup CEO
:)
VCs don't hire techies to CEO startups. You want to "make it big?" Be the tech brains behind a startup, and let the VCs pay you big bucks to make your great idea the Next Big Thing!
What isn't okay is that the avenue that leads to success requires a either a golden ticket and a little luck or nothing but luck.
I'm from a middle class family. I worked hard and played by the rules. I paid my way through college with a part time job, loans and government grants.
Today I'm leading a team of Java developers for a Fortune 500 company. I'm making decent money, and I have time for my wife and kids because I don't travel for work, and I don't work crazy overtime, either. As far as I'm concerned, I'm successful, and while there is something to be said for knowing the right people, and for being in the right place at the right time, that's not all it takes to be a success.
"When Opportunity knocks, it's too late to prepare." (John Maxwell)
If you know someone and get in a job, but have not prepared through hard work, you will quickly fail.
"The harder I work, the luckier I get." Samuel Goldwyn
So.... get lucky!
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
It was the liberal judges (Stevens, Breyer, Ginsberg, Souter) and wishy-washy Kennedy who sided with the city. The conservatives (Rhenquist, Scalia, Long Dong) and wishy-washy O'Connor sided with the homeowners.
In case you haven't noticed, while the neocons like to pretend they are conservatives, they hardly act it. As a matter of fact, they are pretty facist, hence the pro-corporate stance.
I believe that's called a voidable contract -- the minor has the option to void the contract. It becomes void when that option is exercised.
This is as opposed to a void contract, such as one for an illegal purpose. These contracts cannot be judicially enforced even at the will of both parties.
My measure of success requires calling your own shots
Who gets to call their own shots? Do you really think that even Warren Buffett or Bill Gates gets to "call his own shots?" They both have great accountability to others. Even Larry Ellison, who is least concerned with what others think of him is ultimately accountable to the board and stockholders.
If you own your own business, then you are accountable to your customers and suppliers. No one gets free lunch.
We're all trading time for money. Based on your definition, I guess we're all slaves. The way I see it I'm making a calculated trade which is quite favorable compared to other options. If that makes me a slave, I'm one with lots of choice about the type of slavery I'm in, and with little labor compared to the income my "owner" allows me to have. Frankly, I think your definition cheapens the term.
Is "calling your own shots" the entirety of your definition of success?
Sure I knew people, sure I was "lucky." The harder I work, the luckier I get! Part of working hard is building relationships with others. These relationships increase the chance that I will "know someone" or be "lucky."
Yes there are smarter people, and people who "work harder" than me. If they are focused on working hard on things that are not valued by the economy, they will have less financial reward than I have. Digging holes is hard work, but no one is going to pay anyone $500K/yr to dig holes with a shovel.
In my world, there's plenty of opportunity to go around. It's not that there's one fixed-size pie which is sliced thinner and thinner when more people arrive. There's plenty of pie for everyone.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
as a side note, the GPL is designed with much the same idea in mind. Legally, the work is free to use, but the way the GPL is worded is designed to require academic style credit for any code you reuse as opposed to claiming the work as your own.
I think you meant "equivalent" to plagiarism in that the effects and repercussions are the same, but it's still not ''equal'' to plagiarism because plagiarism is a very specific thing. Even if they specify in the university policies that the use here constitutes "plagiarism", they can't really change the nature of the thing that people commonly refer to as plagiarism.