Comments on: Turnitin suit

By: markm

markm — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 16:22:28 +0000

From the discussion over on Volokh, students upload their papers to turnitin.com, and there is a click-through contract that presumably licenses turnitin.com to store and make certain uses of the papers. This is fine for college students, but high school students are generally too young to agree to a contract, probably don’t know enough to understand the contract, and are coerced to agree to it (in the case of public schools).

Not that I think that typical schoolwork has any market value or that turnitin.com is exploiting students in any way – but the law should be the same for all. If it was a private individual making similar use of basically worthless documents to which a large corporation held copyright, what do you think the chances of beating a copyright suit would be?

By: Joe Bingham

Joe Bingham — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 02:08:41 +0000

How is either the size of turnitin.com relevent at all? And isn’t “profiteering” a fancy, derogatory word for “in business”?

The problem, like so many in a socialized system, probably has no good answer. But portraying turnitin.com as a “profiteering corporate giant” is just throwing vocabulary (and capital letters) at the company instead of trying to address the core issue of what rights students are forced to give up to make their forced education work…

By: Paul

Paul — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 20:02:56 +0000

Hmm, let me see, students can either sign the contract, or they can CHOOSE to get an “F” on every paper or “find another school.” Great options, eh! This is a classic case of undue influence to coerce students into involuntarily ceding their intellectual property rights–under duress–to a profiteering, corporate giant. The corporate giant (Turnitin) propers to the tune of $20,000,000-$100,000,000 (John Barrie recently admitted that Turnitin’s business DOUBLES every 12 months) in revenue per year off the backs of MINORS, while the students do not get a PENNY in compensation for their time, reources, or documents that Turnitin monetizes without students’ willing permission. What Turnitin and the school is doing is nothing short of indentured servitude!

By: Joe Bingham

Joe Bingham — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 18:49:24 +0000

I should’ve read Volokh before commenting, since he says what I say (but better) and then goes on to say a lot more (but more insightfully). /blush

I take comfort in the value of my perspective as a student who has granted turnitin.com consent to store my papers (kidding!).

By: Joe Bingham

Joe Bingham — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 18:43:43 +0000

Like a lot of litigation problems, this seems like a problem created by destroying a market. As a college student in the mostly-market university system, I get to decide whether to attend a college which requires turnitin.com use (I do) and in that slightly convoluted way get decide whether to grant turnitin license to use my papers. In the half-market of high school education, though, students who attend public school may not really have that choice to make.

Maybe one of the rights students have to sort-of-forfeit (accept limitations on) to make the socialized education system “work” is the right to their intellectual property?

By: pat

pat — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 17:38:39 +0000

If Turnitin was used as designed, as a teaching tool, allowing the students to do a self-check of their papers, this lawsuit probably never would have happened. Most people are ignorant to the fact that a large percentage of the student papers that are submitted consist of words and ideas taken from other authors without proper citation or acknowledgment. The student that initiated this whole scam lawsuit is a D level student. Do you think it is fair to the honest, hardworking students when the cheaters get better grades on papers by using what someone else wrote? Wake up people!!

By: billb

billb — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 23:53:39 +0000

Ted: But Google gives copyright holders a multitude of ways to opt-out of their spidering and caching (robots.txt files, removal forms, etc.). I don’t think that Turnitin does anything similar.

By: cecil

cecil — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 14:38:25 +0000

The devil is in the details of this one. Who submits the papers in the first place? If the students then there is an implied license, if the teacher then is that not an illegal copy upon initial entry into their database? When I submit a paper to a teacher, the only purpose is to have it graded, no license for any other activity is granted or implied. I realize that some teachers make copies for their personal records, that is fair use, submitting it to a company for archiving/comparison/retrieval is beyond the scope of “normal” usage and I personally would not consider it covered by fair use.

When a paper is submitted for peer review the peers have severly limited rights to the original work. So even considering this service as some form of peer review doesn’t cover them with the needed permissions, in my opinion. But this all depends on what the students and when and if they agreed either implicitly or explicitly. On the other hand, most states allow minors to rescend contracts.

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 23:32:01 +0000

There’s a deep difference between Google or other search engines and Turnitin. Any website author has a defined means to decline having their site indexed. (robots.txt) As this lawsuit exists, there’s obviously no way for these students to decline their essays being stored.

I’ve never used Turnitin, but I speculate that when it reports plagarism, it probably republishes the original document for comparison. I think that this should be fair use, but copyright laws seem to keep being strengthened.

Morally, I think that the students are in the right. They should have control of the proliferation and persistent storage of their work. Otherwise, is Turnitin not creating yet another database on Americans full of unremovable material. What happens if the Turnitin database gets hacked?

By: Justinian Lane

Justinian Lane — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:35:14 +0000

I wasn’t arguing that something on the web is less subject to copyright law. (If anything, thanks to the DMCA, it’s more so.)

What I was arguing is that Google indexes electronic web pages which are by their definition public. Turnitin is taking private paper documents and putting them in electronic form, and then selling access to those once-private documents.

Google doesn’t get in trouble over indexing Overlawyered, for example. But they are running into conflict over scanning and indexing books.

Anyway, the solution to me is simple: Allow students the option opt-out of having their papers sent to turnitin.