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."
can i search my name on turnitin.com?
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.
Why don't they just recruit Gary McKinnon? He may not be the greatest ever to have compromised a US military computer, but he could sure warn them of the dangers in leaving default passwords set.
Anyone else find it exceedingly ironic that the slashdot summary was lifted word-for-word from Anon-a-blog?
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!
Seriously, each professor that I had that used this service specifically mentioned it the first day and it was written in the syllabus. I brought up an objection with each professor and they had no issue with me opting out and them presumably just googling various sentences in my papers. It wasn't an issue, the professors agreed with me when I voiced my objections about the privacy, copyright ownership, data retention, presumption of innocence, etc. The only reason that they used it was because the department head dictated it.
Exercise your rights. It's your paper. Remember, professors are people just like you. While they may believe you to be paranoid, they won't hold it against you if you voice your concerns with logic, passion, and conviction.
In a way it's too bad that this didn't go to trial. Back when I was working in the Academic sector there was occasionally firestorms between students and faculty about this subject.
The major university I worked for (which will remain unnamed obviously) had it in the student contract (or code or bylaws or whatever) that the copyright of anything turned in by a student was owned by the university. I am guessing many universities do the same thing.
So it would have been interesting to see if that sort of fine print clause in a student agreement with a state institution would of held up. If it does I would think that the student didn't really have a case.
I always saw it as testing and rewarding obedience, and the submission to allowing strangers to set your goals and priorities and otherwise to direct your efforts, to take on their tasks as if they were your own with a diligence that lasts well into what would otherwise be your personal time. To me this is the trait college tests which employers would find desirable in terms of obedient workers who don't raise a fuss and are relatively easy to manage. Innate ability determines whether you must focus on the task itself or the willingness to complete it, and learning just means you can more readily incorporate this unwritten lesson. Otherwise, very little that I've seen of formal education (in any form) had to do with testing your personal limits or expanding your mind or pushing your boundaries. The emphasis on rote as opposed to arrival by experience is evidence enough of this fact.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
This is one of those times that i am angry at myself for wasting my Mod points. Very good response sir!
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
Last year my history teacher gave me a had time because I felt it was immoral and illegal for her to post my report without my permission. After days of waiting and a parent teacher conference (high school still :/) she just dropped the issue but didn't inform the rest of her classes that they didn't have to submit it. I licensed it under a Creative Commons Non-commercial use license. She probably just submitted it. :/
"Ok, just file a complaint. I'm sure that semi-literate guy did something wrong enough to slap them down."
I love how the Americans think that suing everybody is the best solution for every problem.
Indeed. Your posting history is all the evidence we need.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
they can just charge the lawyer to their credit cards ...
oh wait.....
...I obey the laws of physics....
"Ok, just file a complaint. I'm sure that semi-literate guy did something wrong enough to slap them down."
I love how the Americans think that suing everybody is the best solution for every problem.
That illness has a self-perpetuating nature, as does all aspects or expressions of "us against them." To sum it up, when you find yourself born and raised in an environment in which most recipients of most legitimate complaints are insensate and unreceptive, the "force of the law" nature of legal remedies become the only undeniable way to call attention to even the slightest injustice. All it really should take is for a person to stand up, with understanding, and call out those things which need to be addressed, to shine a light upon them and remove the shadows of excuses and other utilitarian purposes under which they are sheltered. By comparison, what we have now is not an underlying acknowledgement of human dignity or a celebration of harmony, but the primitive desire to avoid punishment.
It's such a precious thing, such an exquisite privilege, to put the lie to this pattern by nothing other than your living example of a higher order.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.
FTFA: Not about the money?
They probably just wanna make them pay :)
You went to the wrong college then. Or maybe just had a liberal arts degree.
Try an actual science education.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
It seems like they ought to be suing the teacher for distributing and/or reproducing the paper, not the company. As I understand it, the company merely received the copies and stored them. Or does the company allow other teachers to download potentially similar papers if there is a match flagged? Its the same argument about downloading music not being the issue, but rather allowing others to download it from you.
Instead of fighting a big company yourself, just direct the weight of a big company to do itself in.
1. Write a paper. A really, really good paper. A research paper.
2. Get it accepted by a big journal. A really, really big journal like Nature.
3. Now somehow get this sucker added to Turn-it-in's database. Maybe you wrote the paper as a thesis and the prof needs to check it. Whatever.
4. Let the journal know that Turn-it-in has your paper. The paper to which they hold exclusive rights.
5. Pop some popcorn and sit back and let Nature do a little "Hulk Smash!".
6. The End.
(of course there would be several key problems in carrying out such a plan, but it would be delightfully amusing if you could pull it off)
coding is life
Considering a custom written paper usually goes for a couple of hundred bucks if you contact a "paper writing service", even at 150,000 per infringement, they are still no where NEAR the outrageous multiple that the *IAAs want.
The university probably got in the contract that the student give a perpetual non revokable right to the university to use/give/copy the work without a fee. But unelss they qualify for as "work for hire" they retain the original copyright. Mind you it is not the same for work given to doctorant : their result is then really a work for hire and owned by the university.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
You went to the wrong college then. Or maybe just had a liberal arts degree.
Try an actual science education.
I refer not to subject matter but rather to the methods by which they teach and the spirit in which that is done.
Albert Einstein captured the essence of which I speak in a single sentence: "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
We like to kick everyone in the nuts, too, but that takes bit more work, not to mention the subspecies without nuts...
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I have no idea how any halfway decent program in the liberal arts could possibly match Causality's description. My own professors definitely encouraged critical thinking and (at least attempts at) original analysis. It was, in fact, essential to understanding the material. One intended benefit was that students become better rounded, broader-minded people. A liberal arts education that attempts to create obedient, submissive students is not going to successfully teach the subject.
you got to classify them somehow by ability
Why exactly is that?
Software Inventor
How dare you!
We'll see us in court!
Oh... wait... ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
You're paying them tuition and fees in order to get credits and hopefully a degree.
Simply repeating that this (without the copyright assignment) is sufficient consideration is like repeating that "stealing"[1] cable television is OK because the shows on basic cable have advertisements.
The papers belong to the student as the student is the only one with the legal right to redistribute the papers.
And also the only one with the legal right to assign this copyright to another party.
[1] In before "it's not stealing." Theft of services is the legal term.
My minor was in the humanities, and it was a bit of a mixed bag for me. A couple professors required us to have citations for everything in our papers. Most notably ethics, where I wasn't even allowed to talk about what my thoughts on Aristotle's ethics were, I had to have citations reporting what other people thought about it.
Of course, that professor got turned down for tenure.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Your college credit is the salary.
If course credit and a piece of paper is their payment to me then I got ripped off. I hate the higher education system, but have learned to deal with its shortcomings and maneuver through the system to get my piece of paper so that I could finally have my work experience count towards a PE license. I was very annoyed while streaming my graduation ceremony* that the president of the university bestowed my degree upon me with recommendation from the faculty. BS I earned that degree, fulfilled all requirements for such and in then end it was because they felt I was worthy not because I actually did anything.
*I only watched graduation because the president was speaking and wanted to hear what he would say to students who are thousands of dollars in debt as a result of school and graduating in a time of almost no jobs. Worst commencement speech I've ever heard (not that I've been to many graduations).
--
So who is hotter? Ali of Ali's Sister?
Copyright doesn't grant a universal right to control a creative work. Keep in mind that the purpose of copyright is to *encourage* more creative works, not less; in doing so, copyright law will grant certain limited rights of control to the copyright owner in order to encourage more work.
The famous "fair use" test provides an exemption to copyright law, and depends upon the famous four point test. Basically, courts can consider four issues in determining whether or not use of other works without permission is allowable:
Now, this isn't an all-or-nothing or add-up-the-points analysis. Courts take all matters into consideration.
In the actual decision, the court ruled:
On the whole, then, the tool was deemed to be fair use.
Jim Huggins, Kettering University, Flint, MI
Well it's the going rate asked for by the RIAA. I wondered why they settled - if a few mp3s can result in a fine of millions of dollars, why not the same for some papers?
(Disclaimer: No, I don't think that sharing mp3s, or papers, should result in a fine of millions, the issue here is about consistency in law. Also, I think it's reasonable to have more sympathy with copying done for free, versus someone trying to make a profit from someone else's work as is the case with TurnItIn - if the RIAA was only suing people who were selling pirated CDs etc, I doubt anyone would care.)
So that graduate schools and employers have something to go by when selecting candidates. Besides, is it fair to a student who worked hard for four years to start from the same point as someone who partied the whole time?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Now the search goes out for any student who has a paper which is being held by TurnItIn that they did not upload themselves.
Er, no. It was pure supposition on the part of the blog author that the lawyers might be interested in hearing from more students.
On a side note, the students lost. Twice. They were also facing accusations of unauthorized access to the TurnItIn site, and opted to settle rather than face the prospect of actually having to pay for poking the hornets' nest (the district court had ruled against the company, but the Court of Appeals reversed and remanded that decision). Meanwhile, the TurnItIn people had already gotten a favorable judgment on the copyright issue, which serves to dissuade other people from trying to push the issue - no reason to risk that at the Supreme Court if you don't have to.
If I were the lawyers on this case, I wouldn't want to touch it again with a ten-meter cattleprod.
Unless you're drunk, then we think punching the problem in the face works pretty well.
It's when you're accused of plagiarism of your own previous writings that this gets absurd. Do you not have the right to reuse and improve upon your own writings?
I would never let a service like this have any of my original work if I could possibly avoid it. Why isn't there some provision that you can check this paper against others, but you CANNOT add it to your database? It is outright theft otherwise.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I should hope they were turned down for tenure. Only writing about what other people think about Aristotelian ethics is--if you'll pardon my Anglo-Saxon--fucking pointless.
History is a different bag than philosophy, though. Using plenty of citations makes sense there. Though given the various ways historical methods can and have been used, there's still plenty of room for critical thought and analysis.
Make the students write the paper in class and show intermediary work. Only 2-4 full classes need to be sacrificed for it.
Each piece of intermediate work is mandatory and averaged into the paper's overall grade. If they miss the writing class, they could do it at the writing workshop and get a validation slip.
Camping on quad since 1996.
If your studies are directed toward entering a particular profession or vocation, then they are almost by definition NOT part of the liberal arts.
Psychology, in particular, is a social science. The social sciences are somewhat distinct from the liberal arts, though often closely related. If you're being forced to stick closely to the textbooks, it's likely because of the attempts in the last couple decades to make psychology more like the hard sciences--in which personal experience likewise lacks standing.
Well we can't imprison corporations or put them to the death, but further those alternatives would only apply to the enforcement of criminal law.
Spare me the elitism, and tell me how do you suggest civil law be enforced?
To sum it up, when you find yourself born and raised in an environment in which most recipients of most legitimate complaints are insensate and unreceptive, the "force of the law" nature of legal remedies become the only undeniable way to call attention to even the slightest injustice.
This is very well said, and deserves modding up.
Civil action is oftentimes, unfortunately, the only way to get a 3rd party and/or the opposing side in your issue to take an actual look at your side of the argument
Employers have their own processes for screening candidates. GPAs and transcripts are crappy predictor for how well someone will do in a given job. A candidate who, while partying, developed a extensive network of valuable contacts, may well be of more benefit to an employer then one who worked hard at an endeavor that is of no value to the employer.
Software Inventor
You effectively have an agreement with your school or university under which you study there. If that agreement doesn't explicitly allow the use of plagiarism detection services right now, it will in the future. Your choice will be to either agree to it or walk away.
If it can be proven that a student has plagerized someone else's work to write a paper, can they then really turn around and claim copyright on their paper? Doesn't the author they "borrowed" from really hold the copyright?
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
If you read up on the history of higher education, you'd understand that the systems referred to by Einstein in that quote (late 19th/early 20th century) essentially no longer exist. Today's system, at least in decent schools, lets you get out of it what you want. I'd say 70% of the student population in the school I went to was there to finish a BS in four-five years, while putting in as little effort and as much beer as possible. They'd plagiarize, cheat, or do anything else to get by. What they got back was a half-assed education, filled with exactly the sort of problems you descibe.
For a few of us it was a little bit different. By my junior year I was working 20+ hours a week as a paid assistant in a biochemistry lab, working closely with grad students, post-docs, & the profs (as well as a half-dozen other undergrad RAs). I rolled out of there with a fantastic science education, a strong network of professional connections that I continue to use today, 16 hours of transferrable gradute school coursework, and a level of comfort of how to work in a lab that made grad school actually fun.
The point is, the higher education system in which students can receive an individualized education delivering a high level of training in a technically challenging field does exist; actually it co-exists with the beer-swilling do-the-least-possible-work system. You just have to 1) be a little bit talented, 2) be willing to work your ass off, and 3) show some initiative.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
This is absolutely true. And not just for graduate students, but other contract work done for the university, such as with post-doctoral researchers, research faculty/associates, etc. As a matter of fact, it's in your contract and/or university guidelines that even your laboratory notebook is the property of the University. They'll usually let you make a copy of your own notes, but the original notebook itself stays with your department or your PI. And of course, IANAL, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were some sort of legal precedent to these rules.
Even when you publish in a peer-reviewed journal, which most of the time, is a co-authored work anyway, you agree to sign away most copyright to the publisher as well. You're free to make copies of your own papers and distribute them to potential employers and others that may be interested (think distribute in person, hand them the paper directly), though technically you're not allowed to post the PDF of these papers to your own website (though most college professors don't care about this, and do it anyway).
So basically, these students -- sorry, "precious little snowflakes" -- are essentially asking to be treated differently from all the grad students, post-docs, researchers, and faculty out there, and want full copyright and ownership of their term papers that they hand in for class. Why? I am not sure? With the exception of the exceptionally rare student that goes on to become the next Shakespeare, Orwell, or J.K. Rowling, nobody's going to give a rat's ass about ever looking at their term paper again, so claiming copyright on them is essentially pointless. The school's know the sad truth that their papers will eventually become forgotten, but still have a bona fide interest in trying to combat the increasingly growing problem of plagiarism. They're not collecting these papers and selling them on the market (which would be stupid since there's basically no value anyway).
What this whole episode here does tell me, however, is that the copyright system in this nation (and the world) is essentially broken, and a disgrace, and a better solution is necessary.
Many of the draconian provisions in EULA's viewed after purchase of software would be unenforceable for similar reasons. It's simply a case of the power not being abused by the software companies so nobody has had standing or need to sue yet.
It all depends on where you are, and what school you attend. I am completing a PhD in Canada at one of Canada's Tier 1 universities. I own the copyright to all my work, my notes, my essays, my papers (except those that have been published by a major journal), my blog posts, and my dissertation. And yes, I am funded by the university and a provincial agency.
To get my degree, I grant the university (and the National Library) a non-exclusive license to reproduce my thesis in their respective databases, but I hold the copyright. It even says so on the cover page. In fact, at my university, we even have the option to license it under Creative Commons (which I intend to do when/if I'm done).
When I was referring to your laboratory notebook, the fact that individual PIs hang on to that after their students graduate is not so much for copyright, but for going back and being able to answer questions the might arise once your work is published, since your major advisor will be the corresponding author on your work. For example, if another researcher raises questions on work you did 5-10 years after you graduate, they'll contact your advisor, who may want to review the original notes to provide the best answer. So there is significant value to hanging on to these lab notebooks -- not for money or selling it, but for scientific reasons.
Other stuff you do, like your class notes, class essays, or blog posts (plus, if your blog is on the university's servers, they'll probably delete it after a certain period of time -- again, depending on the institution), is of little value to the university (or anyone else, but you, I suppose), so no one's really going to care whether you claim copyright on it or not. Although I suppose in today's legally-obsessed culture, with everyone screaming copyright infringement and people trying to file frivolous lawsuits to make a fast buck, I can't blame students for trying to copyright such petty things,...
For anyone interested in reading an analysis of this case that actually sites precedent and contains legal arguments and not internet arguments I recommend reading the paper available at http://ssrn.com/author=1259310 If 40 pages and 150 footnotes is too much for you the cliff notes is available at http://www.iposgoode.ca/2009/06/us-circuit-court-of-appeals-rules-that-turnitins-fight-against-plagiarism-does-not-violate/ If clicking on links and reading articles is too much for you (and knowing this crowd this might apply to many of you) the bottom line is that the turnitin service is not a fair use (in my opinion). The contract the students signed should be unenforceable, treating students as guilty from the first day of class is wrong, and the potential for massive privacy violations is unavoidable.
These are high school students at public schools. FERPA regulations require that the schools keep their academic records confidential, including any contractors that the school uses.
Add to your list ANY "person of interest". Movie stars, TV commentators, congressmen, city council, high school teachers, suspects in crimes, corporate executives, priests and ministers, newspaper columnists. If I could dig up Bill O'Reilly's high school papers, or my English Teacher's high school papers, I think that would be interesting. I rest easy, knowing that I could burn mine at the end of the year, and they can't haunt me for life. Especially the assignment to "Defend Communism".
Actually, the terms that the student agree to specifically permit TurnItIn to do just that. Have you read them? I have.
"With regard to papers submitted to the Site, You hereby grant iParadigms a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, irrevocable license to reproduce, transmit, display, disclose, archive and otherwise use in connection with its Services any paper You submit to the Site..."
In other words, "if you become famous, we can sell your paper to the highest bidder."
So unless you can successfully defend that no person that is in high school right now will ever become famous, your argument doesn't hold up.