Students Settle With TurnItIn In Copyright Case

An anonymous reader writes "With the deadline for a Supreme Court appeal rapidly approaching, the students who sued TurnItIn.com for issues surrounding copyright infringement reached a settlement with the site's company on Friday. Now the search goes out for any student who has a paper which is being held by TurnItIn that they did not upload themselves. If your teacher uploaded a paper and ran a TurnItIn report without your permission, I bet the students' attorney would like to hear from you."

Comments

Re:Always did wonder

[Planesdragon]

They obviously have to hold copies of works that were not uploaded by the original authors to compare this stuff to. Are they not in mass violation of copyright?

No. Go read the standard of fair use again.

"Academic purposes" are one of the black-letter exemptions. If this were a college doing the bundle and offering it for-free to all participants, instead of a private company making a buck, this wouldn't even be a problem.

Re:how do i find out if my teacher did that?

[commodore64_love]

>>> she reserves the right to upload it as she sees fit. The student agrees to the contract

This contract would be declared "void" in a court-of-law, just the same as various provisions in the Paypal User Agreement were declared void a few years ago. Why? Because contracts can not be used to sign-away rights protected by Federal Consumer Protection laws. In other words, a company (college) can not force a customer (student) to give-up his rights or privileges as a precondition of service,

Nor can a company add conditions AFTER the money has already been paid, which would be the case if a customer does not see the prof's syllabus until the first day. That's called bait-and-switch.