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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.
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.
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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.
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...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?
. It kind of sucks that trust gets tossed out the window so quickly though.
I know people who've made most of their way through their undergrad plagiarizing papers. Not only does that mean my work is all for not, it also sets the bar higher when a prof has read 20 or 30 plagiarized papers. Not that my work's been terrible, but some of those papers are really great, and it makes it harder for me to get a good grade.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
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.
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.
Grade inflation in American universities is insane. Any cause to grade more strictly would only help even it out.
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.
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Huh? The bold part is irrelevant to the lawsuit. The students are protesting the use of their papers not random communication with iParadigms. As such, the terms of service seem to clearly exclude student papers from the all-encompassing rights grab of the rest of the paragraph.
If you knew they were cheating why didn't you turn them in? Most school have an honor code and if it bothered you so much you should have talked to the professors. Personally I don't know anyone that cheats on papers, I'm an English major and that's pretty much all we do in my classes. If people were cheating I'd have encountered it at least once by now, and I haven't.
Anybody who's an English major presumably wants to be one because they enjoy writing (due to the "do you want fries with that?" job prospects). Therefore, they wouldn't want to cheat anyway. In contrast, the types of majors that people who care about money rather than the subject go into, like management, probably have a much higher incidence of cheating.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.)
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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
The problem is that the teachers/staff have no rights to give to Turnitin. The students hold all rights to their own works and the students were never asked to agree to those clauses. I think that it is a clear violation of copyright.
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Hopefully in your "really great" papers you used the correct phrase, "all for naught." Keep up the good work.
You cannot even be party to a contract until you achieve majority.
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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
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.)
Between my 5 English courses this semester I've written 16 papers in 10 weeks. Thats a little lower than last semester and my experience isn't unique. If you think English majors aren't tempted to cheat with a load like that you're kidding yourself, and by sheer odds, even if they were less likely too, the increased volume of work would still bring some out of the wood work. Fact of the matter is, far fewer people cheat than these people claim. Which still doesn't address my point to the OP, if the OP knew there was cheating, why wasn't the professor informed?
...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.
Did you even read what you quoted?
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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.
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...
I have had students tell me that they suspect someone.... I have then gone and looked for evidence. I have caught students sometimes and sometimes I don't. I do however ask students to let me know - in class. Pointing out that it is in the student's best interest to get rid of cheaters. Cheaters only hurt a school's reputation which in turn hurts a student's BS. Go figure. (I also have a board with 'kills' on it - not unlike a pilot in the air force. The students know what it represents. It does work.)
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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.
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.)
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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."
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 am SO confused. I thought information wanted to be free? I thought we don't mind other people "sharing" data. I thought the person who puts their hands on the digital data is the one who decides what the creator should, or shouldn't be entitled to. I thought the copyright infringer is the one who gets to determine what sort of distribution methods are, or are not viable.
These students should be plenty happy. They get what they're "entitled" to out of their work: (good) grades. It's just greedy to be concerning yourself with the idea that some commercial entity which enables professors to MORE AFFORDABLY provide you your education (by way of spending less time simply checking for plagiarism) should be forking over some portion of their profits.
I know this'll be an unpopular viewpoint. Whatever side of copyright infringement a group of young student-types are on at the moment is the "right" one. My mistake.
When you hit grad-student levels and someone "steals" papers you'd otherwise publish, thereby depriving you of your livelihood, we'll talk. Otherwise hand in your damned homework, get your grades, pass you class, get your degree and go get a job.
"Oh no... he found the
My wife is an adjunct professor at a university, and she pretty routinely nails at least 1 or 2 students for blatant plagiarism per class.
She doesn't use any special software or tools though, it's almost always obvious, such as when a student suddenly starts spelling words correctly they have never spelled right all semester, or using coherent sentence structures, etc, and usually googling a few snippets of the questionable paper turns up the plagiarized sources. (Yes, people just copy/paste from wikipedia and other sources without citing it and try to turn it in as their own.)
So, basically, this tool kind of sounds like it's more for professors that are too lazy, unobservant, or overworked to actually recognize their own students writing after a whole semester. And I guess for busting the genuinely clever plagiarists who are buying papers all semester long that they know haven't been published elsewhere online.
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.
It's not fair use if it adversely affects your market, and since your market is students wishing to cheat on their term papers, it's pretty drastic... so there's your damages.
The market need not be plagiarists, it could just as easily be the market for competing plagiarism detection services.
I once got into a discussion about Turnitin with a good college professor of mine. The specific program she was teaching required use of Turnitin - but she didn't use it. She told the entire class, directly, that Turnitin isn't how they find cheaters - it's by reading the students paper and _seeing_ obvious changes in style/diction. Some students still do "cut & paste" plagiarism, though it's a lot rarer now. "Cut, reword, & paste" plagiarism is still not noticed by Turnitin. People must always remember that "cut & paste" plagiarism is only *one* form of plagiarism. Technically, it's illegal to take a fact without citing it. Turnitin fails here as well. Most importantly, however, are that you can have false positives, or just plain database glitches. There was one fellow who was brought in because Turnitin red flagged his paper. Thankfully, he realized it wasn't even his paper - there had been a database glitch. A less observant student & less comprehending staff could have *ruined* that student. These students aren't suing out of want for money (well, they might be for a bit), it's because the system shouldn't be required and, frankly, can cause harm. No system of courts, be it in school or in life, should find even one innocent guilty - even if it means a hundred guilty go free (I should cite this, but I fail to recall who said it).
Furthermore the children were minors; The license for their works may not be enforceable.
Don't take this wrong, but I think I want to be in your wife's class. I can plagiarize with the best of them and if my punishment is to be nailed by the teacher....
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.
"but doesn't create a hugely cutthroat competition in the upper echelons of a class"
Maybe I missed something, but I thought we were trying to teach our children something positive. Do we really want to raise our kids to be even more confrontational, aggressive, mean spirited and anti-social? I would say no.
As an aside to this, I went to a polytechnic that involved a large number of randomly assigned group projects. Basically this threw the successful and underachievers into the same bucket. This whole exercise was basically meant to neutralize a self performance based metric into a group based success role. Teams that did well with each-other would always do better than mavericks, no matter how talented they were. The team working really gave a reflective picture of how you deal with people after those years of school are long over with. You have some who slack off and bring the group down. You have others that push hard to get their work done. Now the onus was on group members to either lift or tear apart each other.
And isn't that whats really important? We plagiarize through life, most of the time we never even think of the backs we're standing on. I would rather deal with solving the problem in a more creative way (like heavy group projects) instead of using technological means to force you to succeed. Some people will never 'succeed' in the way that society places on them. Are they worthless? If so, then we're not making very good use of our resources now, are we?
I you just can't implement something like the above and plagiarism is 'rampant', I see nothing wrong with an anti-plagiarism system as long as there are processes to deal with false positives and that everyone involved knows that it exists.
Bye!
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
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.
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 student pays to go to school, not the other way around. Students hire teachers to teach them. I don't see how turning in a paper becomes "work for hire".
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
While I generally agree with what you wrote, I think you either misspoke or have a misunderstanding of copyright.
Technically, it's illegal to take a fact without citing itFacts can't be copyrighted. For my citation, see any commonly accepted explanation of copyright ever written. Given that, I have no idea how you can conclude that it's illegal to take a fact without citing it.
Maybe you're not talking about copyright, but rather common courtesy and the standards of research that most professions self-police themselves with? If so, it's got nothing to do with law.
Since you seem to be honestly interest, I've looked up the reports of studies which appear in "Academic Dishonest: An Educator's Guide" by Whitley and Keith-Spiegel.
McCabe and Trevino (1993) apparently listed twelve cheating behaviors. The only behavior I'd call less than obviously cheat is that "copying a few sentences of material from a published source and not footnoting them." The rest are all things like copying an exam, plagiarism, getting access to an exam before it's administered, etc.
Oh, and the study ONLY covers college careers. No high school or below is included in the questions.
They find that overall, 78% of students reported at least one incident of one of those behaviors in college. (At honor-code schools it was 58% and at non-honor code schools it was 82%.) Cheating on exams is 52% overall, 31% at honor-code schools and 60% elsewhere. Copied homework assignments (which I'd personally lump in WITH plagiarism) are 42%, 25%, and 50% respectively. Plagiarism is 48%, 31%, and 57%.
There are other studies cited in the first chapter of the above-mentioned book if anyone is curious. The McCabe and Trevino study just seems to be the best-performed and the most reported in the book.
Why is it I see just as many Comp Sci students copying code from a site online as I do in the business classes? Cheating is across the board and is not dependent upon a given 'major,' ... we're talking about a persons morals and values, not where their interests lie.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
I'm not going to bother kludging together something for the second sentance.
Suffice it to say that your argument is based on a premise along the lines of "it's not like you were using those rights anyways." Personally, I find that argument fallacious and take offense when people use it.
What if every student submitted every paper they wrote to the Copyright Office?
Would you also tell them to stfu and gbtw?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You obviously haven't seen his wife.
(For the record, I took Computer Science at McGill. It's a good program. Cheating was rampant)
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. -- Wernher von Braun
'Grade inflation in American universities is insane. Any cause to grade more strictly would only help even it out.'
That isn't my experience at all. My experience is that my grades on papers had little relation to the quality of the paper and a great deal of relation to whether or not what I wrote was what the professor wanted to hear. There were professors who had an unspoken list of criteria for a paper and you could have the most well-thought, insightful, creative, and firmly cited paper and it wouldn't matter. Only the criteria.
In other cases I have seen brilliant papers thrashed for minor spelling and grammar errors. I am talking about papers submitted in Science and Philosophy courses not English and Literature related courses.
My favorite are the Republican and Christian professors who give poor grades on papers that challenge their Christian teachings, the importance of Christian philosophy, etc.
I am a very stubborn and uncompromising individual. When I encountered professors who exhibited these behaviors I'd just drop the class (warning, that isn't cheap especially if you don't catch on to the problem early) and take the same course under a different professor. Miraculously dodging these bunk academics left me with a 4.0 on a 4.0 scale.
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."
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.
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.
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?