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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.'"
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.
It's not so much laziness that I'm concerned about. Students who plagarize deserve to be punished. The real issue is that if Turnitin can make a profit of of other people's work under fair use, then that basically means that students have no IP right and that students are guilty until proven innocent. Back when I was a student, I saw the use of turnitin as a major lack of respect towards me, and I refused to submit my work to it on principle. Since I had never done anything wrong in regards to plagarism, most of my instructors understood and didn't hold it against me.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
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
It also seems quite ironic that they have a fair use right to the full work for the goal in enforcing that no one else can reuse even the smallest snippet.
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"guilty until proven innocent" is a bit of a stretch. The instructor is (at first) only checking. Does any act of investigation presume guilt?
There are a great many forms of investigation that we don't allow in criminal cases, for example, unless there is some justification for the suspicion of guilt. For example, you can't just stop random people on the street and search their belongings for illegal items.
I we apply the same logic, here (mind you, teachers aren't law enforcement, so they're not bound by the same rules), then you would ask teachers to refrain from using such tools without a reasonable suspicion of guilt (e.g. a paper doesn't match the voice of its author or a paper is very familiar to the teacher).
I never liked the idea of punishing students for plagiarism, though. I'd much rather that teachers/professors combine approaches to teaching so that plagiarism gains you nothing without the same hard work that everyone else puts in. IMHO, if turning in a paper that someone else wrote can get me a good grade, that's just a sign that the course wasn't actually teaching anything in the first place, but merely hoping that exposure to the material would magically lead to education of the students.
Good teachers rely on a suite of metrics to gauge student progress and adjust the curriculum to suit. Bad teachers "plagiarize" in the sense that they just deliver the material they were given and grade papers/tests on the basis of their comparison to a hypothetical ideal.
What I meant was "do all acts of investigation assume guilt?" The answer is no. When you get pulled over and the officer runs your license, she isn't implicitly saying "I KNOW you have outstanding warrants!" She is just checking and that isn't a breach of trust. When the instructor runs papers through turnitin, they aren't saying "I KNOW you cheated on this!". He is just checking and that isn't a breach of trust. At least that's how I feel about it.
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If the instructor is reading my paper with the intent of 'diff'-ing it against previous works, no matter what the mechanism, then the trust has already been destroyed. The paper should be read for content, clarity, etc., and if, during that process, something jumps out as familiar or unusual for a certain student's typical work, then there's grounds for further investigation.
By analogy: Let's say girls have cheated on me in the past, and I decided that I would really prefer that didn't occur again, so I'm now regularly searching my new girlfriend's e-mail/phone for incriminating messages. I'd say our relationship is already in a sad state, and it barely even matters if she's actually cheating or not. The trust was broken long before I logged on---and not because of anything she did. That's TurnItIn.
On the other hand, if I just grab her phone to make a call and find a risque incoming text, then I might have a reason for further exploration now, but prior to this incident, I believed her to be faithful/innocent and our relationship was better. Could I have lessened this heartache if I had taken the hypervigilant/assumed-cheater route? To some extent, but you can see how this approach destroys any hope of a trust-based relationship, even in the case where my girlfriend is trustworthy.
I've chosen an emotionally-charged scenario (love) to illustrate the point; the trust between student and teachers serves a more subtle purpose. And yes, I'm arguing that it's okay to let a few crooks slip through if grabbing them all means implicitly accusing everyone. I just don't buy that you gain a whole lot by going to all this effort to catch plagiarists (they tend to catch themselves eventually). But you do lose something . . . something that's about as hard to put into words as it is important.
That isn't realistic. Teachers teach the same thing for multiple semesters. There's no way to make it so that a paper from one class in one semester is not equally valid in another class in another semester.
Okay, with SOME classes that is possible, but not very many.
You didn't get screwed by Turnitin. Turnitin simply flagged a similarity. You got screwed by your prof, whose job it is to make an actual decision.
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