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: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.