Cheating Services and Copyright
So, in my daily web-browsing, I found this Washington Post article linked from Slashdot. The short form is that a few high school students are suing Turnitin for copyright infringement, and I think they have a legitimate argument.
For those who haven't been involved in academia in the last decade or so, Turnitin is a company that specializes in determining if a particular paper is plagiarism. They have a large database of papers on file, and when a new paper is submitted to them that matches an existing paper in their database (via a proprietary heuristic), they alert the professor or teaching assistant of the plagiarism. The trick, you see, is that the papers that are submitted to them are put into their database archive.
Well, the students suing Turnitin formally made copyright claims on those papers before submitting them to Turnitin, and in at least one case, they requested that the paper not be archived. It was. Consequently, they are suing the company, claiming copyright infringement.
You see, Turnitin wouldn't be able to do what they do without their vast archives of papers, and the students are objecting to their papers being used by the company for profit, albeit in the form of a data point for their heuristics.
I, for one, think they have a legitimate argument, even if it might presage doom for cheating services such as this one. What do you think?
For those who haven't been involved in academia in the last decade or so, Turnitin is a company that specializes in determining if a particular paper is plagiarism. They have a large database of papers on file, and when a new paper is submitted to them that matches an existing paper in their database (via a proprietary heuristic), they alert the professor or teaching assistant of the plagiarism. The trick, you see, is that the papers that are submitted to them are put into their database archive.
Well, the students suing Turnitin formally made copyright claims on those papers before submitting them to Turnitin, and in at least one case, they requested that the paper not be archived. It was. Consequently, they are suing the company, claiming copyright infringement.
You see, Turnitin wouldn't be able to do what they do without their vast archives of papers, and the students are objecting to their papers being used by the company for profit, albeit in the form of a data point for their heuristics.
I, for one, think they have a legitimate argument, even if it might presage doom for cheating services such as this one. What do you think?