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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.'"
This is extremely bad news for lazy students everywhere. Won't someone please think of the plagiarists? :)
"i" agree.
wha'? where am i?
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.
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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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
What are you talking about? If you create something, you own it. If you write a paper then you own the copyright to that work whether or not you choose to publish it. Publishing your work does not make your copyright claim any stronger.
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.
They are not the student's private papers. They were disclosed to someone else (the professor) for evaluation. You're right that they aren't published and they aren't public either, but "evaluation" certainly includes "evaluating the possibility of plagiarism". If turnitin.com were making the content of papers available to others or publishing themselves, that might be an issue, but they aren't.
Worst case (if this case had gone in favor of the student), professors would subsequently insist that in order for papers to get a mark the student must allow it to be submitted to such evaluation services. Sign the permission slip or no evaluation for you!
It's got nothing to do with Google, though.
His royalty checks decreased. Google something something books. IT WAS GOOGLE'S FAULT!
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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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.
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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.