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.
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
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. :/
Indeed. Your posting history is all the evidence we need.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"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.
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
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.
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)
Unless you're drunk, then we think punching the problem in the face works pretty well.
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.