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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."
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."
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
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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.
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Indeed. Your posting history is all the evidence we need.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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