Yes, IAAL: It's hard to gauge frivolity without knowing more about the case, and about any evidence that Limewire may have that could prove out their claims. If their claims have no basis in existing law or lack any evidentiary support (i.e. are frivolous), then the lawyers, their firm, or even Limewire could be sanctioned under Rule 11.
Now that I think about it, I suspect that Limewire's counterclaims are not as frivolous as we think. Few lawyers go out and just take a piss when it comes to filing motions. There is too much at stake. Sadly, it's only the frivolous suits or the cases involving plaintiffs who receive big judgments from what at first blush seem like frivolous suits that the public really cares to hear about.
Plenty of teachers maintain academic integrity all the time without the use of turnitin.com
Well, maybe? I think you're asking too much of the site. Turnitin isn't meant to be a substitute for capable grading. Its self-stated goal is to be an aid for teachers and a deterrent for would-be student cheaters. You've got to consider the scale of things, too. If you taught 30 students at a middle school, and by the end of the year you had no idea of the capabilities of your students, you'd have a lot to answer for. But what if you taught freshmen courses at a major university, and routinely taught classes consisting of hundreds of students? I suppose some of the work would get outsourced to TA's, but in the end most students would just get lost in the shuffle. In that kind of situation, Turnitin is a valuable tool to curtail cheating. Just ask any of the "6000 academic institutions in over 90 countries" that use it.
That's a pretty scathing indictment of the current state of affairs in schools. And since I've been out of the public school system for 15 years, I'm not exactly Mr. Current Events when it comes to these things. I have deferred instead to the information at the site you've linked to.
I guess I'm just skeptical of this kid's claims of being an intellectual "super-genius" and yet being completely incapable of helping himself, or of investigating his academic options. Given the fact that he's able to post to Slashdot, he's probably also able to Google for terms like "FAFSA parent's salary age" to learn how to improve his circumstances.
So no, that's not genius, that's helplessness. Yes, I know that pop culture glamorizes geniuses--they can often be spotted ruining Superman's day or psychoanalyzing serial killers when they're not eating human flesh.;) And I know the reality might be that some of these people have problems putting their shoes on in the morning. I'm just not convinced that we just heard the blame-ridden ramblings of a legitimate genius is all.
I'm convinced that the average Slashdot poster would argue with Larry Wall over Perl syntax.
Again, you've confused one thing for another. In this case, it's statutory interpretation with a judicial outcome. For someone so critical of my credentials, you sure have a difficult time distinguishing between two markedly different concepts. You also can't seem to read and understand complex English sentences. Since that's like 80 percent of what I do, I could tell you with absolute certainty that you couldn't do my job if your life depended on it. If English is your second language, then I'm sorry for giving you a hard time about it. If not, then...wow. Just wow.
Me? I am too stupid to understand the intricacies of your mighty interrogatory, but I will have fun trying! Here goes:
If you are asking me if a judge, tasked with interpreting the law, will dismiss the claim of a plaintiff who files a petition stating something along the lines of "their copyright has been infringed but they haven't been harmed in any way except that they're unable to sell a paper to another student in order to facilitate academic cheating and somebody stole their lolly" then yes, that will happen. And the plaintiff will get laughed at, albeit figuratively. And the judge will have no problem constructing language that favors the defendant. It doesn't even matter if the judge subscribes to a theory of statutory interpretation favored by this guy or maybe even this cold, pragmatic bastard. Some judge will get a chuckle out of this.
Confidentially, I hope this guy would get the case. I've met him, and he's a really funny guy. He once famously wrote an opinion containing over 200 movie titles, and I'm certain he would have a good time with that one.
Just out of curiosity, what did your library consist of? I remember back in my 8080 assembly / CP/M days, you could accomplish BIOS tasks (open file, send output to LPT, etc.) by loading up a specific register with a specific value, and then making a CALL to the right memory location. It's my recollection that DOS was so *cough* borrowed *cough* from CP/M that the procedure was more or less the same, even 15 years later.
Yes, only an idiot would confuse letter-of-the-law, statutory infringement with a statement about what a set of laws were originally intended to protect. Whoops! I will now change your status to fucking idiot. Oh my god, you've got to try them with milk!
...the same fucked up system so I decided not to go. As far as jobs go I'm screwed, they all want a degree to even interview let alone hire. I blame the fucked up public schools for throwing away someone with a 192 IQ (i've been tested, by them ironically)... as wells as the fafsa system for including parents' incomes who aren't going to contribute a penny, and racist financial aid counselors who don't give a damn unless you are a minority
That's exactly why you should not have been told your IQ score, because then you'd get the impression that it was meaningful. I was tested as a kid, but my parents and educators were smart and I wasn't told my score, either because it was very high or very low. Now, I myself aced 7 years of college including law school, so I'd like to be positive and think it was the former. But it could always be the latter;) Nobody did you a favor by telling you some made-up number that pretends to be shorthand for your potential.
In some cases, school is harder for intelligent kids, because it often proves so easy that they have to bring more to the table to make it interesting for them. Regardless of a student's "IQ score", they need to approach school with at least some token measure of responsibility and seriousness. You did none of that, so your "the system failed me" attitude really doesn't impress anyone, certainly not me. College is for bright people who are also disciplined. According to you, you only have half of that equation, so it's no wonder you didn't go.
In any case, you're not shut out from a college education, unless you're absolutely committed to being a failure. After age 24 (last I heard), your parents' income is no longer factored into FAFSA calculations, so you should be able to pay for college at most state schools on the government dime. If your past grades are a problem, you can take community college courses (which anybody can take) in order to demonstrate to 4-year institutions that you are capable of doing college-level work. When you graduate, the better jobs follow. And as far as playing the reverse-racism card, don't make me laugh.
I suspect that his disclaimer about being a lawyer is just false appeal to authority and that he is not a lawyer with experience in the field of copyright.
Wrong on both counts. But feel free to think of me as a symbol of how bad things have gotten in the legal field, the same way I think of you as a symbol of how dim-witted and self-righteous the average Slashdot poster has become. This cookie really is delicious.
So, lets see if I got this right. A plagarist will take turnitin to court for violating his copyright on the work that he does not hold copyright because it is plagarised and that will establish precedent affecting actual copyright holders? I suppose the ACLU will be defending him too?
No, idiot, a legitimate copyright holder will sue Turnitin and Turnitin will either win or get a slap on the wrist. I really think you have a reading comprehension problem. Incidentally, I used to intern for the ACLU. Scout's honor. To this day, they guilt me into donating money. If this is all about your trying to see who gets a cookie for being a better liberal, then I win, kid! Haha...watch in earnest as I eat my victory cookie! "Lol!"
Lol, I have no idea where you got that from, but you got a whole paragraph of tilting at windmills out of it. I am the last person who thinks the law is just, especially copyright law. Or wasn't my grandstanding clear enough?
You went with the same old tired "the law doesn't care what I think" copout, that's where.
And judging from the rest of your post, you think that sort of authoritarianism is the correct state of affairs and thus anyone who might think otherwise, especially the kids themselves, can't possibly be right. You know what they said about Mussolini -- he made the trains run on time.
No, the point was that these kids should be protesting a slew of other things, and that to object to Turnitin is comparatively trite. Again, I think you have a comprehension problem. God DAMN that cookie was tasty!
Did you just skip over the part where I mentioned statutory damages so that you could quote one sentence from a paragraph I wrote, and then quote from the exact statue I cited to earlier?
Do you see how retarded it is when I talk about the statutory damages section of the Code, and you reply with "No wait, what about statutory damages!" and quote from the statute I just mentioned?
How about the $200 dollars part? Do you know where I got that? It's what you get after you "win" and your judgment gets reduced to the minimum amount, which will happen. The first rule of statutory interpretation is to read the entire statute, buddy.
from Section 504(c)(2):
In a case where the infringer sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that such infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright, the court in its discretion may reduce the award of statutory damages to a sum of not less than $200.
Why would a student not want to contribute to a system that helps to ensure high academic standards?... because if someone is going to make money from what I write, directly or indirectly, I want a cut of it. If my work is good enough for you to make money from, it's good enough to pay me for it. This holds true whether in the classroom or not.
Also, as a writer, it's my article. If I want to sell it, it's my right to do so. If the person I sell it to turns around and uses it for standards that are less than ethical, that's between him and his school. It does not give his school the rights to what I write.
Right on. Perhaps the service needs to be revamped or reimplemented so that it is more advantageous for hard-working, honest students to be a part of it. Perhaps it could offer self-publishing services, or act as a supplementary way of copyrighting students' works? A $5 off coupon at Blockbuster Video? I understand it's hard to sell students on the idea that it "promotes academic integrity" when all you see is a company that charges schools for access to their works that the company got for free. The way these things are usually handled is to offer incentives to participants. This should be no different.
AFAIK, there have been no privacy issues tied to the Turnitin service. But as we both know, that is no guarantee that private information is not being compiled in some form. I would be very interested to learn about what kind of information Turnitin does and does not gather, and especially how easily works can be attributed to their original authors (since their names usually appear in the works themselves, it's probably pretty easy). It deserves some investigation.
You have a problem with the timeline of your events, and it seems your comprehension of them too.
Since you are not wise
Jesus, your posts just seethe with arrogance and misinformation. Go ahead and try to convince yourself that I'm stupid and ignorant, instead of accepting that there is a chance that you might be wrong about this. I wouldn't expect anything more. I mean, I'm an honest-to-god lawyer in real life, but hey--maybe you're also a lawyer instead of just some smug asshole, and I just don't know what the fuck I'm talking about when it comes to the law. So let me give you the benefit of the doubt.
Submitting each student's work to the system for testing is an implicit assumption of guilt.
Sorry, I really tried to step into your shoes for a minute there, but couldn't make it past the next sentence. Spare us all your Orwellian allusions. We're not talking about submitting to DNA testing in order to get a driver's license, we're talking about trying to keep kids from cheating. I respect that you want to adopt a libertarian stance to this, but you're just so bad at it that it can't escape my notice.
at least they have the legal right to avoid enabling its use against others.
Whoops. Now you're just making things up. I would love to see a citation for this. I won't waste money searching Lexis or WestLaw, so I'll just believe the article when it says that there is still no legal challenge to Turnitin, which is actually a good thing. You see, if (when) the first legal challenge to Turnitin fails--probably because it will be mounted by some jackass kid who actually was cheating--it will set a disturbing precedent that could embolden other companies to act fast and loose with copyrights. And rest assured, those companies will have far less productive aims than deterring cheaters in schools.
And lastly, let me scold you like the petulant child you undoubtedly are: You professed to be a positivist, but what you've written indicates otherwise. People like you believe that the law will prove out your beliefs--that judgments are somehow just and commensurate with your bizarre, out-of-touch liberal worldview. Let me assure you, as somebody who works in the legal field every day, that that just ain't true. You know what? The law / codes of conduct / school regulations will not exonerate honest, hard-working kids and punish cheaters. If they did, then there would be no need for Turnitin to exist in the first place.
The reality is that these kids aren't taught, they are owned. Their lockers and personal property can be legally searched on school grounds. While they attend class, the exterior of their cars can be legally searched in the school parking lot using a drug dog. Questionable practices? You bet. Guilty until proven innocent? Sure. And in a time when the arts and computer education programs are being taken out of schools, when even gym class is subject to budget constraints, the argument against Turnitin is weak indeed. For students to so melodramatically "take a stand" against something that promotes the one thing we have left in the school systems--meritocracy--is embarrassing to us all. Certainly it should not be appropriated as a rallying cry for copyright holders.
Same ol' Slashdot. Look, I am not your foil, to be used for idealistic grandstanding. You pretty much just cut and pasted a few things I wrote, without any context, got modded up for it , and then ducked the real question I posed, so here it is again:
Why would a student not want to contribute to a system that helps to ensure high academic standards?
I can't answer that question myself, and apparently you can't either.
Diclaimer - I am a lawyer, but the following shall not be construed as legal advice in any way, shape, or form:
Copyright infringement doesn't require publication. If you rent a DVD and make a copy of it, you have almost certainly infringed copyright, even though you haven't "published" the work by making your copy available to any third party. In a copyright infringement lawsuit relating to a work with a registered copyright, publication may result in a larger award of actual damages, but has nothing to do with whether infringement occurred.
This doesn't pass the laugh test, sorry. Any judge would dismiss this with prejudice. As the original poster stated, the student's ability to publish her own work for profit has been in no way diminished. That is exactly what copyright laws are intended to protect.
Every paper I submit to Turnitin contains the statement "Copyright 2006 Eric Smith. All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be stored in a database or electronic retrieval system without explicit written permission of the author."
After the course is over...I'll consider legal action.
And sue for what, exactly? Certainly not money, because your case suffers from the same problem as the other students--you have not been harmed financially in any way. You might have even eyed Section 504(c) of the Code and gone "Oh wow, I can sue for statutory damages!" but you won't get them, I can tell you that right now. You might get 200 bucks and a slap on the back. The best you could hope for is the remedy that you yourself demanded. That is, to get a judge's order demanding that Turnitin remove your papers.
If that's worth your time and money, then I say do it. Otherwise, consider this: What would you deem more important, your meager copyright on a few papers that have made you no money at all, or preserving scholastic honesty in America's school systems? If you chose "my copyright" then congratulations, there might be a job waiting for you at the ACLU. If you chose academic integrity, then you would be the same boat as countless schools across the country.
opting out of being part of a witchhunt against other students
To call the use of Turnitin a "witchhunt" is a little disingenuous, don't you think? It implies that those who are caught plagiarizing are wrongly accused. It is an indisputable fact that the number of false positives from the Turnitin service pales in comparison to the number of cheaters the service has helped to bust, so what's the problem? Why would a student not want to contribute to a system that helps to ensure high academic standards? The only consequence of a school using Turnitin is that fewer students cheat. I'm just not convinced that's a bad thing. I'm also not convinced that the notion of implied copyright should be twisted to prevent students from contributing to a system that prevents cheating.
I understand your friend's unique situation, but at the same time it's hard for me to sympathize with someone who couldn't be bothered to submit original work for class the second time through. Most if not all of the other students in that class worked hard to write something new and original for the assignment, and all your friend (probably) did was print out something she already had on her computer. She chose the lazy way out very nearly got burned for it.
FTA, this is what the students are supposedly so concerned about:
But they object to Turnitin's automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights.
And here is Parent's answer to that:
Turnitin isn't republishing the paper, or making it into a made-for-TV movie starring Judith Light, or anything else that reduces the student's ability to resell her work.
They're not preventing the students from enjoying any value that their essay might have, except for the one specific value that they arguably have no right to.
Parent just completely dismantled the only valid objection to the school's using Turnitin. That just leaves the other, uglier objection to the use of the service: Students want to be able to cheat, and contributing papers by proxy to the Turnitin service can frustrate cheaters. These kids should be ashamed of themselves for trying to frame this as an "intellectual property rights" issue when there has been no infringement on those rights to speak of, except in one specific way that constitutes cheating anyway.
These are people who are calling someone else to fix their computer because they can't.
That's right. And it sounds like rather than fix the problems, he suggests open source alternatives to the software they're already using and comfortable with? That's just ridiculous. I suspect that this is a case of the customers going along with it because "the computer guy said it was better" and not because they even care about something like Windows DRM. I like open source software, but the evangelism--even if it's conducted with a minimum of pressure--is misplaced, unnecessary, and a huge turn-off to most people who aren't part of the tech crowd. According to this guy's rough stats, 75% or about 3 out of every 4 people say "no" anyway.
At least he is just turning his customers onto open source alternatives on the same platform, and in that sense what he's doing is fairly harmless. For instance, if you install Firefox on someone's Windows machine, and they discover they don't like it as much as you thought they might, at least they still have that trusty IE icon to click whenever they need to browse.
I've heard horror stories of young, presumptuous techs who promise to "fix" a computer, and then proceed to nuke somebody's Windows 95B OEM / Office 97 installation that they've been using for years, and install Ubuntu with OpenOffice. If they worked for my company, I would promptly fire them.
The king of insecurity - MSIE (with Windows underneath - but you can't have it otherwise, consider MSIE for Mac dead).
It's not 100% true that you need to be running Windows to use IE. Whenever I find a site that needs IE (doesn't happen as often as it used to) I su to the user I created just for IE use, and then run IE under Wine. Works great, and it's far safer than running IE natively.:)
Haha you Brits lost all rights to the language the moment you started lauding a compilation of dick and fart jokes (Canterbury Tales) as quality English writing.;)
because their homes burned down due to the faulty PSU's. I don't know how the smell of charring carpet could have escaped Microsoft's QA, but it sure did. For shame.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, IAAL: It's hard to gauge frivolity without knowing more about the case, and about any evidence that Limewire may have that could prove out their claims. If their claims have no basis in existing law or lack any evidentiary support (i.e. are frivolous), then the lawyers, their firm, or even Limewire could be sanctioned under Rule 11.
Now that I think about it, I suspect that Limewire's counterclaims are not as frivolous as we think. Few lawyers go out and just take a piss when it comes to filing motions. There is too much at stake. Sadly, it's only the frivolous suits or the cases involving plaintiffs who receive big judgments from what at first blush seem like frivolous suits that the public really cares to hear about.
The icing on the cake would then be Rule 11 sanctions against counsel, counsel's firm, or even against Limewire itself.
How can I as a ./ poster, be expected to read this article?
I knew Bob Barker had to be at the bottom of all this.
Well, maybe? I think you're asking too much of the site. Turnitin isn't meant to be a substitute for capable grading. Its self-stated goal is to be an aid for teachers and a deterrent for would-be student cheaters. You've got to consider the scale of things, too. If you taught 30 students at a middle school, and by the end of the year you had no idea of the capabilities of your students, you'd have a lot to answer for. But what if you taught freshmen courses at a major university, and routinely taught classes consisting of hundreds of students? I suppose some of the work would get outsourced to TA's, but in the end most students would just get lost in the shuffle. In that kind of situation, Turnitin is a valuable tool to curtail cheating. Just ask any of the "6000 academic institutions in over 90 countries" that use it.
That's a pretty scathing indictment of the current state of affairs in schools. And since I've been out of the public school system for 15 years, I'm not exactly Mr. Current Events when it comes to these things. I have deferred instead to the information at the site you've linked to.
;) And I know the reality might be that some of these people have problems putting their shoes on in the morning. I'm just not convinced that we just heard the blame-ridden ramblings of a legitimate genius is all.
I guess I'm just skeptical of this kid's claims of being an intellectual "super-genius" and yet being completely incapable of helping himself, or of investigating his academic options. Given the fact that he's able to post to Slashdot, he's probably also able to Google for terms like "FAFSA parent's salary age" to learn how to improve his circumstances.
So no, that's not genius, that's helplessness. Yes, I know that pop culture glamorizes geniuses--they can often be spotted ruining Superman's day or psychoanalyzing serial killers when they're not eating human flesh.
I'm convinced that the average Slashdot poster would argue with Larry Wall over Perl syntax.
Again, you've confused one thing for another. In this case, it's statutory interpretation with a judicial outcome. For someone so critical of my credentials, you sure have a difficult time distinguishing between two markedly different concepts. You also can't seem to read and understand complex English sentences. Since that's like 80 percent of what I do, I could tell you with absolute certainty that you couldn't do my job if your life depended on it. If English is your second language, then I'm sorry for giving you a hard time about it. If not, then...wow. Just wow.
Me? I am too stupid to understand the intricacies of your mighty interrogatory, but I will have fun trying! Here goes:
If you are asking me if a judge, tasked with interpreting the law, will dismiss the claim of a plaintiff who files a petition stating something along the lines of "their copyright has been infringed but they haven't been harmed in any way except that they're unable to sell a paper to another student in order to facilitate academic cheating and somebody stole their lolly" then yes, that will happen. And the plaintiff will get laughed at, albeit figuratively. And the judge will have no problem constructing language that favors the defendant. It doesn't even matter if the judge subscribes to a theory of statutory interpretation favored by this guy or maybe even this cold, pragmatic bastard. Some judge will get a chuckle out of this.
Confidentially, I hope this guy would get the case. I've met him, and he's a really funny guy. He once famously wrote an opinion containing over 200 movie titles, and I'm certain he would have a good time with that one.
They're not as good as Oreos, but they are close!
Just out of curiosity, what did your library consist of? I remember back in my 8080 assembly / CP/M days, you could accomplish BIOS tasks (open file, send output to LPT, etc.) by loading up a specific register with a specific value, and then making a CALL to the right memory location. It's my recollection that DOS was so *cough* borrowed *cough* from CP/M that the procedure was more or less the same, even 15 years later.
Yes, only an idiot would confuse letter-of-the-law, statutory infringement with a statement about what a set of laws were originally intended to protect. Whoops! I will now change your status to fucking idiot. Oh my god, you've got to try them with milk!
That's exactly why you should not have been told your IQ score, because then you'd get the impression that it was meaningful. I was tested as a kid, but my parents and educators were smart and I wasn't told my score, either because it was very high or very low. Now, I myself aced 7 years of college including law school, so I'd like to be positive and think it was the former. But it could always be the latter
In some cases, school is harder for intelligent kids, because it often proves so easy that they have to bring more to the table to make it interesting for them. Regardless of a student's "IQ score", they need to approach school with at least some token measure of responsibility and seriousness. You did none of that, so your "the system failed me" attitude really doesn't impress anyone, certainly not me. College is for bright people who are also disciplined. According to you, you only have half of that equation, so it's no wonder you didn't go.
In any case, you're not shut out from a college education, unless you're absolutely committed to being a failure. After age 24 (last I heard), your parents' income is no longer factored into FAFSA calculations, so you should be able to pay for college at most state schools on the government dime. If your past grades are a problem, you can take community college courses (which anybody can take) in order to demonstrate to 4-year institutions that you are capable of doing college-level work. When you graduate, the better jobs follow. And as far as playing the reverse-racism card, don't make me laugh.
Wrong on both counts. But feel free to think of me as a symbol of how bad things have gotten in the legal field, the same way I think of you as a symbol of how dim-witted and self-righteous the average Slashdot poster has become. This cookie really is delicious.
No, idiot, a legitimate copyright holder will sue Turnitin and Turnitin will either win or get a slap on the wrist. I really think you have a reading comprehension problem. Incidentally, I used to intern for the ACLU. Scout's honor. To this day, they guilt me into donating money. If this is all about your trying to see who gets a cookie for being a better liberal, then I win, kid! Haha...watch in earnest as I eat my victory cookie! "Lol!"
You went with the same old tired "the law doesn't care what I think" copout, that's where.
No, the point was that these kids should be protesting a slew of other things, and that to object to Turnitin is comparatively trite. Again, I think you have a comprehension problem. God DAMN that cookie was tasty!
For you and me, sure, but it's the choice that schools must make when they whether or not to remain subscribers to the Turnitin service.
Do you see how retarded it is when I talk about the statutory damages section of the Code, and you reply with "No wait, what about statutory damages!" and quote from the statute I just mentioned?
How about the $200 dollars part? Do you know where I got that? It's what you get after you "win" and your judgment gets reduced to the minimum amount, which will happen. The first rule of statutory interpretation is to read the entire statute, buddy.
from Section 504(c)(2):
Right on. Perhaps the service needs to be revamped or reimplemented so that it is more advantageous for hard-working, honest students to be a part of it. Perhaps it could offer self-publishing services, or act as a supplementary way of copyrighting students' works? A $5 off coupon at Blockbuster Video? I understand it's hard to sell students on the idea that it "promotes academic integrity" when all you see is a company that charges schools for access to their works that the company got for free. The way these things are usually handled is to offer incentives to participants. This should be no different.
AFAIK, there have been no privacy issues tied to the Turnitin service. But as we both know, that is no guarantee that private information is not being compiled in some form. I would be very interested to learn about what kind of information Turnitin does and does not gather, and especially how easily works can be attributed to their original authors (since their names usually appear in the works themselves, it's probably pretty easy). It deserves some investigation.
Jesus, your posts just seethe with arrogance and misinformation. Go ahead and try to convince yourself that I'm stupid and ignorant, instead of accepting that there is a chance that you might be wrong about this. I wouldn't expect anything more. I mean, I'm an honest-to-god lawyer in real life, but hey--maybe you're also a lawyer instead of just some smug asshole, and I just don't know what the fuck I'm talking about when it comes to the law. So let me give you the benefit of the doubt.
Sorry, I really tried to step into your shoes for a minute there, but couldn't make it past the next sentence. Spare us all your Orwellian allusions. We're not talking about submitting to DNA testing in order to get a driver's license, we're talking about trying to keep kids from cheating. I respect that you want to adopt a libertarian stance to this, but you're just so bad at it that it can't escape my notice.
Whoops. Now you're just making things up. I would love to see a citation for this. I won't waste money searching Lexis or WestLaw, so I'll just believe the article when it says that there is still no legal challenge to Turnitin, which is actually a good thing. You see, if (when) the first legal challenge to Turnitin fails--probably because it will be mounted by some jackass kid who actually was cheating--it will set a disturbing precedent that could embolden other companies to act fast and loose with copyrights. And rest assured, those companies will have far less productive aims than deterring cheaters in schools.
And lastly, let me scold you like the petulant child you undoubtedly are: You professed to be a positivist, but what you've written indicates otherwise. People like you believe that the law will prove out your beliefs--that judgments are somehow just and commensurate with your bizarre, out-of-touch liberal worldview. Let me assure you, as somebody who works in the legal field every day, that that just ain't true. You know what? The law / codes of conduct / school regulations will not exonerate honest, hard-working kids and punish cheaters. If they did, then there would be no need for Turnitin to exist in the first place.
The reality is that these kids aren't taught, they are owned. Their lockers and personal property can be legally searched on school grounds. While they attend class, the exterior of their cars can be legally searched in the school parking lot using a drug dog. Questionable practices? You bet. Guilty until proven innocent? Sure. And in a time when the arts and computer education programs are being taken out of schools, when even gym class is subject to budget constraints, the argument against Turnitin is weak indeed. For students to so melodramatically "take a stand" against something that promotes the one thing we have left in the school systems--meritocracy--is embarrassing to us all. Certainly it should not be appropriated as a rallying cry for copyright holders.
Same ol' Slashdot. Look, I am not your foil, to be used for idealistic grandstanding. You pretty much just cut and pasted a few things I wrote, without any context, got modded up for it , and then ducked the real question I posed, so here it is again:
Why would a student not want to contribute to a system that helps to ensure high academic standards?
I can't answer that question myself, and apparently you can't either.
This doesn't pass the laugh test, sorry. Any judge would dismiss this with prejudice. As the original poster stated, the student's ability to publish her own work for profit has been in no way diminished. That is exactly what copyright laws are intended to protect.
And sue for what, exactly? Certainly not money, because your case suffers from the same problem as the other students--you have not been harmed financially in any way. You might have even eyed Section 504(c) of the Code and gone "Oh wow, I can sue for statutory damages!" but you won't get them, I can tell you that right now. You might get 200 bucks and a slap on the back. The best you could hope for is the remedy that you yourself demanded. That is, to get a judge's order demanding that Turnitin remove your papers.
If that's worth your time and money, then I say do it. Otherwise, consider this: What would you deem more important, your meager copyright on a few papers that have made you no money at all, or preserving scholastic honesty in America's school systems? If you chose "my copyright" then congratulations, there might be a job waiting for you at the ACLU. If you chose academic integrity, then you would be the same boat as countless schools across the country.
Cheers.
To call the use of Turnitin a "witchhunt" is a little disingenuous, don't you think? It implies that those who are caught plagiarizing are wrongly accused. It is an indisputable fact that the number of false positives from the Turnitin service pales in comparison to the number of cheaters the service has helped to bust, so what's the problem? Why would a student not want to contribute to a system that helps to ensure high academic standards? The only consequence of a school using Turnitin is that fewer students cheat. I'm just not convinced that's a bad thing. I'm also not convinced that the notion of implied copyright should be twisted to prevent students from contributing to a system that prevents cheating.
I understand your friend's unique situation, but at the same time it's hard for me to sympathize with someone who couldn't be bothered to submit original work for class the second time through. Most if not all of the other students in that class worked hard to write something new and original for the assignment, and all your friend (probably) did was print out something she already had on her computer. She chose the lazy way out very nearly got burned for it.
And here is Parent's answer to that:
Parent just completely dismantled the only valid objection to the school's using Turnitin. That just leaves the other, uglier objection to the use of the service: Students want to be able to cheat, and contributing papers by proxy to the Turnitin service can frustrate cheaters. These kids should be ashamed of themselves for trying to frame this as an "intellectual property rights" issue when there has been no infringement on those rights to speak of, except in one specific way that constitutes cheating anyway.
That's right. And it sounds like rather than fix the problems, he suggests open source alternatives to the software they're already using and comfortable with? That's just ridiculous. I suspect that this is a case of the customers going along with it because "the computer guy said it was better" and not because they even care about something like Windows DRM. I like open source software, but the evangelism--even if it's conducted with a minimum of pressure--is misplaced, unnecessary, and a huge turn-off to most people who aren't part of the tech crowd. According to this guy's rough stats, 75% or about 3 out of every 4 people say "no" anyway.
At least he is just turning his customers onto open source alternatives on the same platform, and in that sense what he's doing is fairly harmless. For instance, if you install Firefox on someone's Windows machine, and they discover they don't like it as much as you thought they might, at least they still have that trusty IE icon to click whenever they need to browse.
I've heard horror stories of young, presumptuous techs who promise to "fix" a computer, and then proceed to nuke somebody's Windows 95B OEM / Office 97 installation that they've been using for years, and install Ubuntu with OpenOffice. If they worked for my company, I would promptly fire them.
It's not 100% true that you need to be running Windows to use IE. Whenever I find a site that needs IE (doesn't happen as often as it used to) I su to the user I created just for IE use, and then run IE under Wine. Works great, and it's far safer than running IE natively.
Haha you Brits lost all rights to the language the moment you started lauding a compilation of dick and fart jokes (Canterbury Tales) as quality English writing. ;)
because their homes burned down due to the faulty PSU's. I don't know how the smell of charring carpet could have escaped Microsoft's QA, but it sure did. For shame.