Cheating Services and Copyright

[kniedzw]

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

Comments

[bluegargantua]

I can see a couple of counter-arguments:

1.) First off, I seem to recall that when I went to college, I signed a waiver that said if I invented a better mousetrap that made use of school facilities in any way, the school had dibs on it. Perhaps there's a similar waiver here that could be stretched to cover? Even if this suit actually makes it through, school could just turn around and have students sign similar waivers for their essays and other written work to be entered into a plagiarism database.

2.) The value of a single essay as a plagiarism data point has got to be vanishingly small. And it's not like the contents of the essays are actually being reproduced or consumed by an audience. They aren't even being examined by a human reader (except possibly at the end where an essay comes back with the item it was most likely copied from).

3.) Consider that this service is actually protecting the copyright of the students whose papers are part of the database. If someone steals their work and attempts to pass it off as their own, this system makes it less likely that they'll succeed -- the cheater won't be able to illegally profit off the hard work of the original essayist. And this copyright protection is completely free.

later
Tom

2.)

[kniedzw]

All valid points. That said....

1. Most universities' policies are blurry in the area of copyright assignation at present, and this is a battle that has waged back and forth for years now, across multiple bits of technology, albeit mostly with faculty. Moreover, you can't say that public high schools that are using Turnitin have the same policies, and we are talking about high schools, at least in this case.
2. Well, yes, but there still is a value. ...and what if that database were to be sold? Its value would arguably be higher in the hands of a different owner, and I'm not sure if I want the legality of a database to be dependent on its stated purpose.
3. A definite point, but it misses the point that you should be able to opt out of this service.

...but you do hit some big points there that I can certainly see. We'll see how this pans out, I guess.