Slashdot Mirror
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."
I always did wonder how these plagiarism detection things were able to legally continue to operate. 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? Are not the teachers who uploaded this stuff at least as guilty as file sharers, I mean after all, my term papers from college are way more useful than a new tune from Bittany.
But my intelligence isn't proved in some one-time essay. It's all about how I create real solutions for real problems.
If you are incapable of taking a task, and expressing the solutition to said task in written form, then you're essentially sub-literate. Unless you're an astonishing genius, you're just a drain on your company due to your inability.
College doesn't test, train, or reward INTELLIGENCE. It tests, trains, and rewards LEARNING and ABILITY -- which are three very, very different things.
Choosing to bypass testing is the right answer, no matter what the question.
God, I would love to work for your competitor. "Sir, BadAnalogyGuy's company is beating us!" "Ok, just file a complaint. I'm sure that semi-literate guy did something wrong enough to slap them down."
It would depend upon the job you are seeking. Recently a great guy, insightful, good instincts, and ethical, who dealt very well with people was let go before his status became permanent, mainly because he could not write in a cogent manner with any speed - it took him all day to write what most finished in an hour. Unfortunately, the job required judgment, dealing well with people AND depends, in the end, on writing skills.
I can't quote it exactly... but when he made the point, nearly EVERY head nodded, including the three appellate judges. It was one of those made-for-TV moments. This was right around the time of the US Presidential election:
something like "You can bet if Barack Obama's or Sarah Palin's high school papers were stored on the *most secure server* on the internet, they would have been hacked. There's no doubt that a site with the lax security of TurnItIn would be hacked."
Man, ya shoulda been there!
Copyright law is supposed to protect corporations from potential customers. It is not meant to be used to protect authors from corporations. This is a perfectly honest corporation advancing its agenda by innocently infringing the copyright of authors. Corporations are supposed to get unequal protection under the law. How this court could see fit to apply the law equally in this case is beyond me.
/sarcasm
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
they had no issue with me opting out
You do not have to, and should not have to, opt out of your creative works being infringed.
The only reason that they used it was because the department head dictated it.
If the department dictated that the professor should take your laptop, sell it on eBay, and give the money to some third party corporation, would you see the professor as having done no wrong? This corporation is building its cashflow on your creative work, without license. If they want to come to you and negotiate a deal to use your creative work in their business model, fine. Until then, it is yours.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Indeed. Your posting history is all the evidence we need.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
How are they going to claim that a work by the student is copyrighted by the university? If they were paying me a salary then I could see it, but they're not. I'm paying for the education, so it's mine.
At my school there's nothing about copyright being handed over (in fact, as to TurnItIn, faculty are enoucraged to use it, but have to make it optional; usually means doing an annoted bibliography if you refuse) but there is a clause that they will consider any submission of previously marked work as plagarism. E.G. if a single paper is valid as course work in more than one course, and you hand it in twice they will consider it plagarized (I think there may be something to the effect that written permission can void this actually, never seen it given though). Not exactly the same thing, and I can see the university having an interest in this not happening, but I find the very idea one could "plagarize" oneself laughable, and the policy is honestly just as insulting as TurnItIn requirements. If a prof really needs new work just put it in the bloody course requirements.
But my intelligence isn't proved in some one-time essay. It's all about how I create real solutions for real problems. It's never about some random problem that some dumbfuck in some ivory tower created. Choosing to bypass testing is the right answer, no matter what the question.
Testing is not perfect but it does have a useful purpose. Yes, everybody is unique blah, blah, but there are millions of students at all levels in the USA and you got to classify them somehow by ability, so what method do you propose? The right answer is to keep improving the testing methods, not to bypass testing. A good test should present something like real world problems and take into account the difference in priorities for engineering students, versus, say English students etc. And by the way, the ability to communicate, including in writing, is very important even for nerds.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Aren't you a precious little snowflake? I assume your parents are big donors to the school.
Actually, I was a broke as shit college student paying my own tuition by working 60 hours a week on top of being a full time student so I wouldn't fall into unmanageable debt. I live by my principles and my convictions, when those are violated I act to correct them. Taking 10 minutes out of my day to right a wrong certainly isn't going to kill me, though it may inconvenience me.
The profs should given you two options - put up and shut up, or an F. I suspect most teachers have better uses for their time than googling random phrases, especially when the college is already paying for an automated method.
Professors get paid by my check every semester. They are there because students like me say they can be. I suspect that they felt it is worth letting one student opt out than it would be to fight it. Sure, they may already be paying for he automated response, but this article mentioned a lawsuit which is nearly ironclad in that students are in fact having their rights violated. Do you think that colleges have a standing order to willfully disregard student's wishes in regards to an already murky legal area? It wouldn't make sense; they'd accept my wishes to opt out, spend the extra time, and go on with their lives.
And what about the more common case of being a student who was forced to upload things to turnitin or fail the class? Sounds like a pretty big bloody loophole to leave considering how easily schools can find various ways of blackmailing a student into "voluntarily" doing things.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Well of course it's wrong. Suppose that one of those students if the next Roddenberry (Star Trek), JMS (Babylon 5), or Joss Whedon (Buffy/Angel/Firefly) and said student created a great story for his class. Why should this student have to give-up his copyrights to some asshole company?
This is just another way that corporations seek to steal ideas, stories, songs from artisans by takng-over control of the copyrights.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Just how in the hell is a syllabus a contract between teacher and student? At best, it is the standard by which the teacher announces the intended requirements and flow for the course - at worst, it's nothing more than a homework and study guide.
Thank god your wife doesn't teach where I go to school, most of us don't put up with that kind of crap and will drop the class before the first period is over.
What a crock! And if her class is a requirement for graduation and happens to be the only session being taught in a given semester, I'd be willing to wager you would get a lot of complaints. B.T.W. does she states this in her syllabus clearly, or do you wait until someone complains and then bring in the lawyers?
The patriot volunteer, fighting for country and his rights, makes the most reliable soldier on earth. (Stonewall Jackson
>>>Sounds like bunkum to me.
No it isn't bunkum that the U.S. Courts declared various sections of Paypal's contract "void" since the contract violated federal laws. Similarly a professor that demands a student give-up his rights is also in violation of these laws. For example the professor can not say in his syllabus, "You lose all right to sue me for sexual harassment."
Yeah I know I used an extreme example, but so did you with your anti-gun argument. The point is that there are some rights/privileges than can Not be given-away via contract, because the U.S. laws supercede the contract. One of those rights is copyright. A business like Walmart can not force a customer to give-up his stories as a condition of service. Neither can XYZ College.
Another right is to not have terms added to a contract AFTER the money has already been paid by the customer. That's a breach by the business. For example Walmart can't suddenly tell me, after I bought some Levis jeans, that I am only allowed to wear them on weekend. Neither can a professor arbitarily add terms after payment has been submitted.
Such things must be revealed *before* the money changes hands.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall