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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.'"
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.
I'm afraid Google doesn't distribute the works they scan. They store copies of the works, use them for searching, and display at most a sentence or two where they found the match with the search terms along with a link to someone who does sell copies of the work.
I got screwed in a graduate course by turnitin because i used CIA world fact book to source my variables and instead of, after each variable, writing the exact same source I did so after all of the variables.
long story short, the stupid machine said i stole my stuff from some other web-page that mirrors fact-book and i got a C in the grad course.