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Untangling Copyright and Plagiarism: Sudents sue Turnitin.com

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog:

High-School Students Take On Turnitin

Students at McLean High School, in Virginia, have already expressed their displeasure with Turnitin, the plagiarism-detection service used by thousands of schools and colleges (The Chronicle, September 22, 2006). Now they're taking their complaints to court, as The Washington Post reports.

Two unnamed students from the school filed suit this week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., citing copyright law and seeking $900,000 in damages from iParadigms LLC, Turnitin's parent company. (A pair of Arizona students, also unnamed, are co-plaintiffs. All of the students are minors.)

Does the lawsuit have legs? Some intellectual-property experts think so. When teachers or professors submit students' essays to Turnitin, the company adds those papers to a massive database against which subsequent submissions are checked. It does so without reimbursing the students, and that's where the lawsuit comes in. The McLean students submitted copyrighted papers to Turnitin with instructions that they not be stored in the company's archive. The students say Turnitin went ahead and did so anyway. --Brock Read

Check out the comments after this post on the Chronicle's blog. The readers continue to conflate plagiarism with infringement and find these students' suit absurd. The problem is, this is a relatively straightforward case of infringement. The students have the right to regulate copying of their work -- even if elements of their work come from other (unattributed) sources. As long as the student contributed pretty minimal creativity to the project (arrangement, order, etc.) then she has something worthy of copyright protection. Wholesale copying by Turnitin seems to be pretty egregious infringement. Am I wrong?

Posted by Siva on April 2, 2007 10:56 AM |

Comments

Is it my understanding that the students are forced to submit their papers as a requirement of the course? Are they allowed to negotiate that point with the school or is it a contract of adhesion? They ought to sue the school if that be the case. Administrators are very adverse to litigation. A couple of lawsuits over the coercive aspect of the deal and most schools wouldn't use Turnitin.

Posted by: Jardinero1 [TypeKey Profile Page] | April 2, 2007 12:07 PM

At my last undergraduate institution it was department policy for one of my two majors that all papers had to be turned into turnitin.com. It is a point of adhesion with them, because the department in which I received my second major did not make us turn papers into turnitin. In fact, there were professors in that department who were anti-turnitin.com

Posted by: Nani [TypeKey Profile Page] | April 2, 2007 02:54 PM

We've avoided Turnitin at UT for various reasons. The formerly-known-as CNI Copyright list now [PIJIP-(C)]has a pretty long thread on the subject, with people taking both sides as to whether or not Turnitin's use is fair.

Posted by: cjovalle [TypeKey Profile Page] | April 3, 2007 11:52 PM

Siva, you are definitely right. Your points have been obvious to me for years. In fact, most attorneys who are familiar with the case believe that Turnitin is in serious, serious trouble.

You may be interested in reading the article that I wrote about Turnitin last year:

http://www.essayfraud.org/turnitin_john_barrie.html

It's lengthy, but contains shocking, well-referenced information about how Turnitin REALLY works.

Posted by: EssayFraud [TypeKey Profile Page] | June 18, 2007 02:57 AM

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