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Fair Use Affirmed In Turnitin Case
Hugh Pickens writes "The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has issued an opinion affirming a ruling that will be cheered by digital fair use proponents for allowing a fair use of students' work when their teachers electronically file students' written work with the turnitin.com Web site so that newly submitted work can be compared against Turnitin's database of existing student work to assess whether the new work is the result of plagiarism. The court stepped through the fair use analysis, dropping positive notes that affirm commercial uses can be fair uses, that a use can be transformative 'in function or purpose without altering or actually adding to the original work,' and that the entirety of a work can be used without precluding a finding of fair use. Techdirt suggests that all of these points could have been helpful to Google in defending its book scanning efforts, 'since it could make pretty much the identical arguments on all points.' Unfortunately Google caved in that lawsuit and settled, 'denying a strong fair use precedent and making Google look like an easy place for struggling industries to demand cash.'"
You missed a letter... unless TurnItIn lost the use of I as part of the case.
This is extremely bad news for lazy students everywhere. Won't someone please think of the plagiarists? :)
There is a significant difference in what Google was doing with books, where its stated purpose was to provide excerpts (chapters usually) of the book itself.
Turnitin allows automated computerized determination of direct plagiarism, without providing the content to other people.
In the final confrontation with the alleged plagiarist the teacher would probably have to have the original work in hand, but for the analysis portion no human need see either the new or the old work.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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since it could make pretty much the identical arguments on all points
No, it couldn't because Google is directly distributing the works it scans, as opposed to turnitin.com who is selling services based on analysis of the works, and not distributing the work itself.
I dunno if this qualifies as fair use. It has a severe impact on the potential market for the work being copied :-)
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
The write-up is hopelessly messed up.
The Fourth Circuit actually ruled on the Turntin case.
Turntin is the now bankrupt company that promised to make a killing using a proprietary process for alchemy.
The court ruled that the metallic proceeds could be shared freely with roofers and electroplaters.
The company plans to move forward with plans to transmute metals with real value in future as soon as their cold fusion reactors are up and running.
This verdict is basically total nonsense.
These works were never published. Therefore they should not be
subjected to the same expectation that an author cannot completely
control his work. These are all stolen unpublished works. They are
the student's private papers. Defenses based on copyright shouldn't
even be applicable.
The fact that those that don't want their private papers stolen might
be despicable is not relevant.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I understand and largely agree with the ruling, but isn't there another issue? Do I have any right to have my (quite possibly deeply personal) ideas kept private from this company (TurnItIn)? Do I have an expectation of any level of confidence between my teacher and myself?
Might this lead to another argument in this kind of case?
I'm curious having never used it. Do they do matching on a full document level? Do they do it by paragraph, by sentence, by phrase? Is there some kind of heuristic to prevent rewording, synonym replacement? How do they handle false positives like two block quotes from the same source?
This is extremely bad news for lazy students everywhere. Won't someone please think of the plagiarists? :)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Google did not cave. It was a coldly calculated business move that still might pay off.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
Google directly has an effect on my royalty checks. For that, they've injured me, and the effort I went thru to produce ten books. They have yet to pay me for that abuse.
In the case of fair use for term papers and the like; their commercial value is less clear, but in one swoop, the court killed any commercial return for these works. That's a bit onerous.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
If history of digital material is any example, then it's "No negative effect".
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
IAAL. IMHO, the TurnItIn case won't have much effect on other fair use cases. This was a made up, test case, in which a couple of high school kids and their parents claimed that any attempt to detect their plagiarism by comparing their papers with others violated their copyrights in their own [plagiarized] work. Their chutzpah got the result it deserved. Any lawyer smart enough to be a judge can write a convincing, or at least consistent, opinion on either side of a case. Don't expect the TurnItIn case to make much difference where the copyright owner has a plausible claim.
Bullshit.
There is no evidence that shows making available online means no one buys your books.
If just being available meant no one would pay, iTunes would have sold over 2 billion songs.
Many case where someone does just start referencing or using someone elses material, the original work sales increase.
The only effect on your royalty check would be an increase.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So the big guys with the big lawyers get fair use, but for the little guy, it's DMCA takedown notices all the way down
Google directly has an effect on my royalty checks.
How did you determine that?
*sigh* back to work...
It could also be argued that if a student set up a service where they sold copies of their class work for other students to turn in as their own, and for educators to buy copies to identify those students attempting to copy, then Turnitin would be directly infringing on their copyright. The plagiarism in this case would not be illegal, since purchasers have been given permission by the author to claim credit for the work. Would Turnitin still be considered fair use?
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Please correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that Turntin's source of revenue is based on a database of work created by other people (students). It would only seem fair that, regardless of whether or not the work was published, the authors should receive some kind of compensation for Turntin's use of their paper(s), since without these papers, they would not have a service to offer.
It does have a direct economic impact in that it prevents students from selling their work to other students to use as their homework.
His royalty checks decreased. Google something something books. IT WAS GOOGLE'S FAULT!
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
Do I have an expectation of any level of confidence between my teacher and myself?
Generally speaking, no, and this doesn't change that fact.
In most cases, all papers (and other research) submitted as part of a university course do not belong to you, but to the school itself.
Even if Turnitin.com is not violating copyright, then surely the schools and teachers are violating copyright by sending a complete copy of your work to Turnitin. The school is making and distributing a digital copy of the work which should not fall under fair use.
Now, writing an essay for your class constitutes work for hire, the school doesn't have the right to distribute this work or make copies of it as they necessarily must do in order to use the turnitin service.
the first time that their database is used in an improper manner, turnitin will look like incompetent fools. The judge who ruled this decision will look like an even bigger fool.
What if I turn in my paper with a digital signature or license agreement? turnitin will eventually mis-use the work.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I think I will start a database complete with every piece of music ever written, regardless of copyright, in order to ensure that no new music that is written is through plagiarism. I'm just SURE that the music industry, and the courts in their pocket, will view this in entirely the same vain, and recognize that these copies of recorded music on my hard drives are completely within my fair use rights....
Yes, as a fair use proponent I agree with the decision. Though, even if it didn't apply as an "unpublished work", I still don't see this as a problematic use, in that I don't see any reasonable expectation of confidentiality. If there was one, certainly not one that would extend to expecting the professor would not store, or otherwise use his paper in accordance with the needs of the professor and institution to fairly dole out credit (including keeping, or causing others to keep, a copy for purposes of checking for plagerism now and in the future).
This "use" is quite "fair". Now, if the professor was posting the papers online himself for others to read.... or selling compendiums of papers etc.... thats another story. However, this sort of use seems quite reasonable, and unreasonable to put restrictions around beyond basic protection of the privacy of the student involved (oooh... now how does this relate to FERPA? ... which often does, in some part, apply to students (I used to work in University IT) )
What I find worriesome is the technology itself. Essays are often about similar topics. Papers are seldom about really original topics or even originals slants. Overall, amongst the growing number of similar papers out there, I do wonder how long it will be before their false positive rate starts to climb? Will we begin to see students accused of plagerism for nothing more than not thinking of much new to say, and having a writting style similar to some other unoriginal sod with the same paper topic?
Sure, the chances that someone else will write the same paper you did is pretty small, even with lots and lots of papers. However, what about the chances that any two people in a wide database of student papers will write almost the same paper, given the same topic, and same sources. That question worries me far more as I fear that as time goes on, the chances of this happening approaches 1.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The definition of plaigarism is that one passes another's work off as their own. It has nothing to do with whether they had permission to do so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism
This is an example of a tool that is far too powerful for the people intended to use it and therefore distructive. I remember getting chewed out by a teacher because I had a 2% match on a 10 page paper. Things like "that is" "before that" ect. were interpreted as plagiarism because somebody on the face of the earth had written them before. Oh course the dumbass teacher saw the 2% and failed me on the paper, which I had to fight all the way to the top of the school, where thankfully somebody bothered to check it out and realize I was being burned at the stake. For my remaining years I was considered somebody to watch thanks to this service and the brain dead people who use it.
I never said that it wasn't plagiarism. I said that it wasn't illegal due to having the consent of the copyright holder/author to do so. Please correct me if I am wrong here. Is it illegal to allow someone else to put their name on your work?
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
That may be true in some countries, but I haven't found that to be true here (USA), UNLESS you are being paid by the university. It is common for graduate work to be university property, because it is also common for graduates to be paid by the university to do the research.
Undergrads usually don't get paid by the university to do research or to write up other papers, so their classwork still belongs to them.
Apparently the courts have decided that they don't get to control what is done with their own work. Why should they? Its not like the courts like the little people anyway. They don't have big enough checkbooks to matter.
Not at all. Look at politicians. Nobody goes off the deep end because they use speechwriters.
The question you want, however, is it considered a violation of the school's honor code? And the answer is most likely yes.
It is not illegal, though that person may be in violation of some schools' policies.
I released many of my school papers under a license that was essentially the creative commons attribution share-alike license, but with the attribution clause negated. You could legally use it, so long as you did NOT attribute it to me. Sadly no one tried to use any of them (that I know of), so I never got to test the intersection of contract/copyright law and school rules.
Not a sentence!
wait a sec. Obviously the student's works have economic value- to TurnItIn! If they weren't scraping work from ten thousand high schools, they wouldn't have a database of work to do their comparisons against. The court's fair-use analysis is nonsense. In an honest evaluation, all four factors weigh against the company:
These judges should be ashamed.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
this analysis misses the point. If Turnitin wasn't allowed to just copy the works without permission, they would have to pay students for a license. The unlicensed use is in direct economic competition with the potential sale of legitimate licenses. This is exactly the kind of taking that copyright is supposed to prevent.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
The institution where I work has been considering the Turnitin products lately. It has been an interesting process analyzing what it can and cannot do, and how to avoid a confrontational situation like that described in the article. First of all, Turnitin can't detect plagiarism. It is a text matching software suite, and can detect commonality between works. Plagiarism is a social phenomenon, and can't be dealt with by an automated tool.
Where the product really shines in my opinion is when it is used as a teaching tool. Students are permitted to submit their assignments to Turnitin before they submit to their instructor, and they get back their originality report from Turnitin. Then they have the ability to *learn* proper attribution and citation with the help of this tool. When a paragraph gets a low originality rating, they can look and verify whether they have correctly cited their source material, and if they have, then they're good to go. When used like this, Turnitin becomes a valuable teaching tool that is appreciated by the students rather than something they try to fight against. And what is the goal in the end? It's not to throw students out of college, it's to make sure they understand how to attribute things correctly, and make them better writers.
To answer the question about what happens if there is a match to a paper from another institution: In that case, an instructor account can request a copy from the other paper's instructor via Turnitin. If the request is granted, the appropriate sections are forwarded to the requesting instructor.
Oh it's definitely unethical, but that doesn't make it an illegal enterprise, which is my point. Since it is a legal enterprise, then can turnitin be held liable for unfair competition?
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
No one was talking about the legality of plagiarism. You don't get arrested for plagiarising your term paper, you get permanently expelled from your university system. The fact that you had the authors permission doesn't change that fact, you're still lying to your university.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Google directly has an effect on my royalty checks.
Oh, it was a direct effect? That means, of course, that Google negotiated your royalty checks down with your publisher?
Oh, you meant that there was an INdirect impact via a reduction in sales due, in part, you suspect, to Google making portions of your work available online.
Of course, you haven't done anything even approaching a rigorous study to confirm any of this. You don't even have a control, do you? You just have "I'm not making as much money as I think I should be."
That said, welcome to the nature of fair use. Fair use does impact sales. People who would otherwise purchase a book, in some cases (not all) are people who instead go to a library or borrow from a friend or leaf through a copy on someone else's desk or buy it used (first sale... now there's something that impacts your pocket!)
But it does affect your ability to make a claim of economic impact, which is the whole point of this thread. If you were engaged in an illegal business, then making a claim of economic impact would hold no legal standing.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
It is true that not all plagiarism involves copyright infringement (for example, plagiarizing from the public domain, or with permission of the author as in your example). However, once you transfer the copyright of your paper to someone else (who passes it in as their own), you no longer own the copyright and cannot resell it to another student. It would be pretty hard to make money off that business model unless you sell each paper for a lot of money. Reminds me of the scene in the Rodney Dangerfield classic "Back to School" in which Dangerfield's character pays Kurt Vonnegut (playing himself in a cameo) to write a college paper on his own book. It gets a failing grade.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Turnitin and other similar shit should be abolished.
If professors want to catch plagiarism, they should do their fucking job and read the assignments that are turned in.
(No, pawning them off to the TA doesn't count, because the TA can't speak English!)
I once heard a definition of plagiarism that included failure to cite references to one's own (previous) works. I say that is really dumb. (Myself Discussions on plagiarism. U.S.A. 2 January, 2001.)
In the case law, the factor of "economic impact" is almost never limited to direct competition. In fact, quite the opposite. Think of the case involving the 2 Live Crew parody of "Pretty Woman." In that decision, the court noted that the rap parody wouldn't really be competing for the market that the original was going for. However, they also noted that it might compete in the market for authorized rap versions of "Pretty Woman."
That fair use was OK, but the broad economic impact rationale is found all over the place. There's practically no use that won't have an economic impact when you consider the fact that pretty much any use could be licensed. "Fair use" always has an economic impact if you consider that that specific use could have involved license payments.
In this case, you could argue that viewing TurnItIn's practice as fair use deprives the students of the ability to license their works to plagiarism detection services. That's not really that far-fetched. I haven't read this opinion, and I don't have the time to right now, but I suspect that what is being perceived as a victory for "fair use" in this case is simply a prioritization of corporate interests over individual interests. That, and TurnItIn probably had better laywers.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Learn your copyright law. All that's needed for copyright to apply is fixation in a tangible medium of expression. Publication determines length of copyright in some cases, but what constitutes "publication" these days is pretty blurry in any case...
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Or further along those lines, what if a competing service to turnitin were to offer royalties to the students for including their work in the database. Then the author of the work should have the chance to include their work in that database, but they're denied that opportunity by turnitin using their work for free.
I'm only half kidding here - we need a shrink-wrap EULA for student papers that prevent this use of our intellectual property. In university they might have better standing to say "agree to it or get out", but in public schools I'm sure you could find a way to restrict use of your papers for the "originally intended purpose only" - i.e. grading me.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Here in the US, there is little doubt that the students own the copyright to their homework/papers:
Article that reviewed of the policies of 20 major universities:
"Traditional academic work product-under copyright policies of all universities surveyed (20), copyright ownership of non-directed academic works traditionally created by faculty and students (books, articles, theses, etc.) vests with the creators of such works."
http://www.academic.umn.edu/provost/reports/pdfs/peer_overview.pdf
Notice that copyright on paid/sponsored works or works that are substantially based on University resources are held by the University.
Good teachers rely on a suite of metrics to gauge student progress and adjust the curriculum to suit.
This reminds me of one professor I had. A speech class was required where I went but I wasn't good at getting in front of classes most of the tyme. So when I decided to take speech I asked around for a tough professor hoping taking one would help. She was tough, but on the first day she explained she didn't grade so much on how we did but on how much we improved when we gave a speech.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I don't think the economic impact argument holds water. Turnitin isn't competing with you in selling your paper, they're just showing that there are similarities between your paper and another paper. There's no distribution involved, and this use falls under fair use, so no copyright violation.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
The Supreme Court has stated that the single most important of the "fair use factors" is the economic impact on the copyrighted work - i.e. will the allegedly infringing work compete for marketshare?
In the case of turnitin.com the answer is "definitely not".
Your post misses the point just like the Fourth Circuit did. As pointed out by another commenter below, the commercial market should be the student's ability to sell his/her paper to turnitin. The student, at a minimum, should be receiving a modest fee for this. So, yes, there "definitely is" a commercial market for a student work.
book to the world. TurnItIn is only providing the paper content to the individual teacher. TurnItIn is making money from a service provided to the education community. Google is making money from advertisements to a world wide audience who were attracted by the book content which is commercial use of the book content with no other purpose.
There's two problems I see with this argument. The first one is that Google does not show the whole book. Google has returned book entries when I've used it, however the most it had displayed is a few pages at most. Then as TFA says those books Google does return see an increase in sales, which benefits the publisher.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
if a student set up a service where they sold copies of their class work for... educators to buy copies to identify those students attempting to copy, then Turnitin would be directly infringing on their copyright.
doesn't it seem odd that fair-use only applies when it is in the favor of the party with commercial interests in that information? likewise, fair-use doesn't seem to apply where there is potential revenue to be made..
submitted an assignment on "Tea". It was a very thorough work complete with references, citations and sources, not to mention some nice colour photographs. You can still see it online in its fullness. Just type the word "Tea" into wikipedia.
The ruling was count zero. In my old university the ruling might have been "Get thee to a nunnery"
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
Great news! Now I'm starting up a website that will allow (for a small subscription fee) major record labels to see if musicians are "cheating" off of their artists by archiving complete tracks "for research purposes".
All right RIAA, pony up!
...with false positives?
You know, when the topic lets two people in the same country write something that is similar enough, for the teacher to suspect that it is the same work? Or when the raw text pretty much is the same text. It is unlikely, sure. But if you know anything about probability mathematics, you know that you should never expect that the theoretical probability has to match the real probability.
The question then is: Does "innocent, until proven guilty" count then, or will it be more the Gitmo style? Will they take a number of differences below a certain level alone as sufficient proof? I hope not.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
No, they wouldn't. Copyright in no way prevents educators from using their work like this. Comparative works are explicitly permitted under fair use. You could make some crazy argument about breach of contract, but I don't think a contract can coerce you into giving up your fair use rights.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Google directly has an effect on my royalty checks. For that, they've injured me, and the effort I went thru to produce ten books.
If what you wrote was good then Google having scanned them should lead to more sales thus increasing your royalty checks.
Of course to really boost your sales perhaps what you could do is create downloadable pdf versions of your books. You could then either allow anyone to download them or could sale them online, I believe Amazon sales them. To add to your cash flow you could then provide a method by which purchasers could order a printed copy and either pay a local print shop to custom print and bind the books or you could do it yourself. I've thought about doing this myself, I love photography and would like to try my hand at making money from it, so what I could do is take orders for coffee table photography books. Perhaps even allow buyers to create their own books by allowing them to pick the photos for their own book. This is becoming popular with wedding photographers.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
So, does this mean that if I copyright my homework it can still be turned in? Or does this just mean that I would have to copyright in order to prevent it?
I wonder how this would affect a university's academic dishonesty policies if done conversely, i.e. a database of homework assignments that students submit to and maintain themselves in order to ensure that there are no "false positives" when one turns in an assignment.
If this was made public, could these be considered "published" before they were turned in? IANAL so I would be interested in seeing if a student could take steps to give themselves legal recourse for a prof submitting their homework to Turnitin.
"I do not avoid women, Mandrake . . . but I do deny them my essence." - Gen. Ripper
Reminds me of the scene in the Rodney Dangerfield classic "Back to School" in which Dangerfield's character pays Kurt Vonnegut (playing himself in a cameo) to write a college paper on his own book.
Yea, and the prof says something along the lines the scientist wouldn't write something so bad.
Falcon
Shake it up baby!
Should there be a Law?
The "close imitation of the language and thoughts". If you have possibly hundreds or thousands of sample works on a particular topic it is very likely that duplication will start occur. It may start out at 1% match but as the database grows the matching to existing parts of other items will grow till the point where it will be virtually impossible to actually write something that is considered actually original by a logical computer.
How many ways can you interpret Shakespeare? I know my English had no frig'n clue about Shakespeare but if your interpretation did not closely imitate his language and thoughts you where 100% wrong! Every passing paper was remarkably similar in its verbiage.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
The books scanned by Google are all published. Student papers are not. Fair use works a lot differently for unpublished works than for published ones.
When I was in college (not all THAT long ago), it worked like this: we turned in papers (on paper, not online). The instructors graded the papers and wrote comments on them. We were given back the paper so that we could see the grade and read the comments, after which we had to give the paper back to the instructor. They were then kept in the department office for something like 6 months after the course ended, after which we could go pick them up. If we didn't pick them up in a reasonable amount of time, they were thrown away. At no point were any copies made. We were told that the purpose of the 6 month retention was in case there was a grade dispute, which seemed slightly (but only slightly) bogus because there was no opt-out if the student knew s/he didn't want to dispute the grade (e.g. if s/he got an A+ then there's not much to complain about).
I certainly would consider it invasive if unpublished materials I wrote were retained indefinitely after the class ended.
The Supreme Court has stated that the single most important of the "fair use factors" is the economic impact on the copyrighted work - i.e. will the allegedly infringing work compete for marketshare? In the case of turnitin.com the answer is "definitely not". The copy is not displayed publicly (in my understanding), it is just uploaded for comparison to other works. I can't think of any argument that this has any financial impact on the author.
But what if I want to sell my papers to other students? The fact that turnitin.com is keeping a copy of my paper is going to significantly decrease the value of my paper right? Sounds like an economic impact to me..... (Yes, playing a bit of devil's advocate...)
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I once had an english professor who would make us submit our papers hand written. They weren't too long and it was a very basic class but each student still had to go through the material they were writing down.
Wouldn't the standard way to abuse the DMCA be to put some kind of trivial "Copy/access protection scheme" on the material being turned in? The teacher is given the necessary tool to unlock/access the content, but anyone else accessing the content (without the student's permission, of course) is bypassing/circumventing an access control feature.
So (apparently) unlike most people posting so far, I'm a faculty member at a university. Here's why we use Turnitin;
1. Something like 10% of all work submitted for assessment at college (university in the rest of the world) contains plagiarism of one form or another (far too many citations to bother listing)
2. The perception that other students are successfully plagiarising is believed to be a risk factor promoting students to plagiarise (along with a sense that the assessment is meaningless, faculty don't know or care about students as people, and poor time management skills)
3. Gathering the evidence to formally address an instance of plagiarism takes anything up to a couple of days vs a minute with Turnitin
4. The system makes it possible to treat everyone equally. The alternative, which I have seen many times, is that the faculty member pre-judges the student and looks harder for plagiarism when the work is 'too good' for the student. This commonly occurs for non-white middle class students, despite the evidence that white middle class successful students plagiarise to a similar extent that non-white, non-English speaking background students do. Sadly, subconscious racism is very much alive in academia
5. Turnitin does not label a piece of work as plagiarism - the faculty member reviewing the report does. Direct copying is only one of a variety of ways that plagiarism occurs. Turnitin is the only practical way I know of that faculty can use to detect plagiarism by citation - where you steal someone else's bibliography.
For those of you bitching about your loss of copyright - (re)read the decision. The judge is very clear that you have lost nothing and are in no risk of losing anything. Consider this case one of the consequences of the right of "Fair Use" - the rest of the world would love to have the same freedom but US Trade representatives are hell-bent on making sure we don't.
Finally, Turnitin does not show the work to other people, other than your instructor without their permission (which most can't give as its not their work). Most matches turn out to be to public sources or to work of students in the same programme. When we get a request from an outside institution we refuse it- and then immediately re-run the Turnitin report for the student in question.
I block TurnItIn from scanning my websites. Will continue to do so I consider plagiarism fair use.
Let me just chime in here as a university lecturer who has papers turned in to him. I am posting anon, just in case my employer finds out and doesn't agree with me.
I agree that there is a very uncomfortable lack-of-trust issue here, and I would resist ever using such a system to check for plagiarism. When someone hands me something, I don't assume it's plagiarized; I assume that, provided the paper doesn't represent some sudden jump in writing ability or knowledge of the subject, that person wrote it. When I do get a paper that just doesn't sit right, I start Googling. If I find something, I print it out and highlight the lines that match exactly, staple it to the back, and hand it back with a zero. There's no need to argue at that point, and I assume the situation is now resolved.
In cases when Google doesn't help, I have to call them in and have an awkward conversation. If they say they got help at the writing center, I just call the people down there (several of whom I know socially) to find out. If they say he or she was in there, end of story.
If all that doesn't help, I just walk around the department and ask if anyone else has had this student and if they've ever gotten a paper that didn't sit right. If so, I keep digging; if not, I let it rest.
Here's my thing: I am not some grand gatekeeper trying to make sure that no one leaving my university does not have a firm grounding in comparative religions. It matters for the majors, but most of my students are just fulfilling some requirement. Also, my majors are studying what I teach on purpose; they aren't that likely to cheat. This is what they chose.
Basically, if you cheat in university, you are only hurting yourself. It will come back to bite you later in the semester or in other classes. I believe that as long as teachers exercise due diligence, the system works fine. Furthermore, as a student, although I never plagiarized, I did sometimes cheat. But you know what that taught me? It taught me that cheating is often harder than just doing the assignment right, plus it runs the risk of getting expelled, plus you don't learn anything and you have to catch up later. Those are extremely valuable lessons, both in school and in life. Following the rules is always the easiest, best policy.
Before Google, did people plagiarize? Hell yes. Did they get away with it? Sometimes/often, yes. Did the world grind to a halt because some slackers got Bs instead of Ds in a couple classes? ...Not last I checked.
The truth is that the massive hump in the middle of the bell curve is always bigger and more important, in the grand scheme of things, than the outliers, but humans are crap at dealing with probabilistic thinking, and waste a lot of time dealing with outliers, when outliers have a way of dealing with themselves. Spending a lot of time, insulting my students, and posting their homework (even anonymously) to a public website, all to deal with the few jackasses trying to trick their way through a degree program is, IMHO, a massive waste of time.
Pro tip for fun: 1. Do your homework in advance. 2. Post your paper online at several websites (sign up for free webspace if you need). Make sure your name is on your homework! 3. Submit to search engines. 4. Hand in paper 5. Let teacher freak and accuse of plagerism 6. Appeal the grade and point out your name is on the online work. The teacher is just trying to fail you. If they did their own research they would have seen your name. 7. Point out that sharing work is an academic rule not an exception. 8. Make sure the entire school knows about Teacher's shoddy work. 9. Profit?
They shouldn't have been attacking the use by TurnItIn instead they should have attacked the school's requirement to post their essays on TurnItIn.
I assume the US has a legal requirement for children to be educated (in the UK it's until age 16 at the moment) so what they should have done was attacked the requirement that the co-erced them into uploading essays to TurnItIn and specifically that this resulted in them having to sign over certain rights allowing TurnItIn to use their work. If they didn't agree then they wouldn't get the education to which they are legally entitled.
They should have refused to sign up to TurnItIn's site and then sued the school for not providing an education.
I assume they didn't bother hiring lawyers because these seems such an obvious route of attack any half-way competent lawyer should have seen it.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
As a graduate student who teaches college courses I find turnitin to be a horrible company that I refuse to use as either a student or a teacher.
As a student I refuse to turn over my intellectual property to some company and I refuse to be accused of plagiarism before the professor even sees my paper. I refuse to allow them to profit off of the sweat of my brow. The more papers they have in their system the more they can claim to be useful.
As a teacher I think that if I don't know my students well enough or I don't craft my assignments specifically enough that they are difficult to plagiarize then my students should be able to get away with it. I won't subject my students to such a system that I won't submit to and I won't threaten my relationship with my students by subjecting them to this kind of accusatory system.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Suppose the author intends to sell their work to other students to use as source material for their essays.
Then Turntin has a negative impact on their market share, as the student's product is now worthless to sell.
In fact, if you believe Mr. Flint, then putting your books online for free actually helps your sales.
Cynical Idealist
Except if you have yet to distribute your work, then the only copies out there are stolen. It would be like claiming fair use when writing a review of the latest X-Men movie that has yet to hit theaters by downloading a stolen "physically" copy.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
With regard to papers submitted to the Site, You hereby grant iParadigms a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, irrevocable license to reproduce, transmit, display, disclose, archive and otherwise use in connection with its Services any paper You submit to the Site whether or not originally submitted in connection with a specific class. This license shall survive the termination of the User Agreement. Any cessation of use of the Site shall not result in the termination of any license You grant herein to iParadigms.
That's pretty messed up. I wonder if you can hand in a paper in shrink-wrap with your own EULA.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
However, once you transfer the copyright of your paper to someone else (who passes it in as their own), you no longer own the copyright and cannot resell it to another student.
Sure, but there's nothing to prevent you giving a student a non-exclusive license to pass the paper off as their own. You retain the copyright, so you can sell more non-exclusive licenses to as many other students as you like.
I can't think of any argument that this has any financial impact on the author.
Suppose there is a company that derives profit from the statistical analysis of submitted papers. The student is losing their right to license their papers to that company. Meanwhile, the company profits from having free access to a paper that was otherwise never published. Seems straightforward to me.
> Except if the original matches the one that the student turned in,
> then isn't the student the one who committed copyright infringement?
Not if the original work was public domain or legally licensed to the student for that use.
He would be plagiarizing in both those cases, however, if he didn't properly attribute the source of the material he used --- understand the difference?
Anyway, my understanding of the system is that the student himself submits his work to turnitin.com via the use of a web browser. I suppose they then pass the work on to the the teacher, accompanied with the plagiarism check results.
At my university, students retain the copyright in most cases, but assessments are required to have a cover sheet which (amongst other things) permits the assignment to be stored and used for detecting plagiarism. Interestingly, I'm not sure if it actually gives permission for the lecturers to check if your work is plagiarised, but I assume that is covered in the full policy referenced on the cover sheet. I do not believe that most lecturers actually do use TurnItIn or similar, since in many of my courses, student submit hand-written work, and because it is very hard for someone manually checking work to spot plagiarism for undergrad courses in maths or the hard sciences, where there are mostly fairly short answer questions and the papers stay the same from year to year.
A key factor in this case is the motives involved, as well as where the profit comes from. A service that is designed, not to collect the works of students, but to help verify if a student is cheating or not is a VERY different thing than trying to make a copy of every last document for no other purpose than to collect more information.
In the comparison to verify if a student is cheating, that is a service to make sure people are not cheating. This can be clearly seen as a benefit to customers of that company. For Google though, what profitable services can they offer other than to sell access to that information to others, payable by either the end user or advertiser?
Making information public as well is not something most people want either, because if you are not a great writer or student, the last thing you want is to have the fact advertised to anyone trying to look into your background. Honestly, if you have a weakness in certain areas that do not have a direct impact on your job, do you want to encourage the development of a system that would let potential employers see your weaknesses? The danger could be as simple as looking for a job as a writer, and losing out on the job because you did poorly on some physics or calculus assignment in college which shows up because Google is seen as a way to get highly detailed information about potential employees.
So, fair use...that is the real key here. Posting the information for all to see vs. posting the information to have originality verified. Or, posting the information that someone else came up with for other motives.
I'm about to start using TurnItIn.com. Why? The one or two students who plagiarize use a disproportionate amount of my time. Building a good case against a plagiarist takes 2-3 hours. I'd rather my time went to people caring enough or honest enough to do the work. I also want to remove the temptation.
Yes, there are idiots out there. I work with some. On a few recent days, I've been an idiot myself, having had only a few hours of sleep with my newborn son in the house. Sadly, many faculty members have a subspecialty in assholery.
However, most places have guidelines on how to use this service. At my institution, they (the Powers) ask repeatedly that teachers consider the TurnItIn reports carefully prior to accusing a student of plagiarism. I now I sure as hell will, as that decision to level an accusation is the point at which that 2-3 hours of documentation, paperwork, and signature collection will kick in.
By the way, the person who did this to you is probably hated by everyone around him (or her). You can content yourself with knowing that they are a miserable piece of shit. Failing that, or it failing you, George Herbert said that living well is the best revenge.
"When you get pulled over and the officer runs your license," ... she is doing it to ensure her own safety since certain types of outstanding warrants may indicate the person being pulled over is or will be dangerous when dealing with a cop.
You know, this "turn it in" thing sounds like a system just waiting to fail. The more data they add to the thing, the number of possible combinations of words on a topic that aren't going to trigger as "plagerized" gets reduced.
Eventually, such system could make it impossible for any student to write a legitimate paper on anything because every conceivable combination of words within sentences and sentence fragments will probably be in the database already. If this system is also compensating for plagerism accomplished by thesaurus style "find and replace" methods, it could fail even faster.
One has to wonder when this system will hit the point of no return...
8==8 Bones 8==8
If that were true, then most academic, published papers would be plagiarism. As I've seen it, authors copy whole sections of their previous papers and put them into current papers. Think about it, you are writing about step 10 of a 12 step research process. You previously wrote a summary of steps 1-8 for a paper on step 9, and for paper 10 you plop in the 1-8 summary, plus a section or two for step 9. And the summary 1-8 isn't just a sentence or two, it's a page worth of material. If would be completely ridiculous for you to have to re-write it, and putting it all in quotes would be stupid. So, you just add it.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
They call it ghostwriting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_writer
loose: not fitting closely or tightly != lose: to suffer the deprivation of
I signed a contract with a book publisher, not with Google. I wrote the book for an audience, and signed the book publisher to reach that audience. I didn't sign a deal with Google. I didn't release the copyright to anyone but the publisher, who by contract (a common contract) cannot release it to others. Google's ability to offer my hard work for free to anyone searching, robs me of my ability to sell the work through the channel of my choosing. In fact, and without a doubt, they stole my hard work and offered it for free to anyone that can search on specific terms.
To writers that want to paraphrase my work, go ahead. Those that plagiarize my work will be punished when I find them. It's theft of my hard damn work, and my blood sweat and tears.
Google simply took the book from a university library shelf, and redistributed it to the world, intact and incarnate. That, my friend, is theft. I don't want Google to expose my book. Google in fact thwarts my income by giving my work away for free.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I signed a contract with a book publisher, not with Google. I wrote the book for an audience, and signed the book publisher to reach that audience.
So you don't want a greater audience? If someone other than the publisher can increase a book's audience that spares the publisher expenses so they can offer higher royalties. Not that they will but it can be a bargaining chip.
Google's ability to offer my hard work for free to anyone searching, robs me of my ability to sell the work through the channel of my choosing.
Google does not offer whole books but even if they did many people don't like reading entire books on a monitor, many want hardcopy and it's cheaper to buy a book than print it at home. The last tyme I saw the cost of printing one page on typical printers it was more than 10 cents a page, so it would cost $10 to print 100 pages. I've bought books for $10 that had more than 200 pages. Of course this could change if e-ink can be made to resemble paper. However that would cut the cost of distribution. Google also includes links to bookstores where it can be bought.
Google simply took the book from a university library shelf, and redistributed it to the world, intact and incarnate. That, my friend, is theft. I don't want Google to expose my book. Google in fact thwarts my income by giving my work away for free.
I'd love Google to index and include my books, and articles. I haven't finished and submitted a book to a publisher yet but I did submit articles to magazines. Unfortunately I lost the books and articles I was working on, after I survived a disability. What gets me is I had an editor interested in one of my articles. I submitted a proposal and she wrote back that she wanted my article to focus on one aspect. However as I implied in the post you replied to I'll probably want to self publish books anyway.
Should there be a Law?
You're incorrect in all regards.
I get to control how I want my works distributed. Google robbed me of that.
Google does in deed offer my works in their entirety. Go fish.
The actual COGS for my books ranges from 91c (204pps) to $1.34 (392pps with color). Go fish again.
Google is not my desired channel. You shouldn't let them be yours, either. I've written 14 books and have had 10 published. I don't want Google's hands on any of them, for any reason, at any time. They have, in fact, stolen them from me. In this regard, they're no better than the Pirate Bay's distribution of Adobe Creator or MS Office.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
If that's how you feel okay, but I want my work to be as widely marketed as possible.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Do you want a publisher that's incentivized to make revenue on what you publish, or Google-- who gets zero for doing it?
I want the greatest audience I can get. The more people who see my work the more buyers I get.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
They make $$ from my paper in their database...I want compensation or get it the fuck out of there