Students sue anti-plagiarism site for copyright infringement

by Brad Linder Mar 31st 2007

Got a term paper to write? No problem, just fire up the old internet connection and copy some text from Wikipedia. Of course, in the good old days, you had to copy off of a neighbor or buy a copy of a paper some other student had written a few years ago.

Hoever, modern technology means more than just new ways to cheat. It also means new ways to catch cheaters. A couple of years ago, many schools started turning to plagiarism checking software like Turnitin. The software includes a large database of documents, and when a paper is uploaded the program checks it against that database.

But here's the thing. It then adds that paper to the database for future reference. And it doesn't ask your permission. So a couple of high school students decided to sue Turnitin for copyright violation.

To strengthen their case, they obtained copyrights for 6 papers that were submitted to Turnitin, and are seeking $150 thousand in damages for each violation, for a total of $900 thousand. One paper even included instructions that it was not to be added to the database. It was anyway.

It'll be interesting to see how this turns out. Google has not generally been held responsible for copyright violations when users upload copyrighted material to YouTube, because Google is protected under safe harbor laws. All Google has to do is act to remove the material when it is notified.

Turnitin may be protected under similar grounds if the company can argue that it is the teacher's responsibility to determine what documents are appropriate for uploading. Hopefully this lawsuit will at the very least prompt Turnitin to remove uploaded papers from the company database upon request.

[via Techdirt]

Tags: copyright, lawsuit, plagiarism, turnitin

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

jonathan said 1:42PM on 3-31-2007

Papers written for class are the property of the school. The copyright principle is "work for hire". As long as the school, is ok with the system, the students have no recourse. It certainly is true in the university system, I can't see why it wouldn't work in high schools.

John Gettler said 1:43PM on 3-31-2007

Congratulations...you have invented a whole new way to write large numbers. Writing some of the large number numerically, and some of it with words.

'$150,000 in damages for each violation, for a total of $900,000.' is how the rest of us have done it for quite awhile now.

CaliberSRT4 said 1:43PM on 3-31-2007

I hope the students win. I had to use that dumb site when I was writing papers. I don't see what is wrong with "plagiarizing" when the person is dead anyways. But I never had a problem passing the turnitin.com thing, it's just another hassle for students...I don't know but most students get stressed over writing one and those sites just make it worse.

emmzee said 1:59PM on 3-31-2007

"I don't see what is wrong with "plagiarizing" when the person is dead anyways."

The problem with plagiarizing (even if the person you're copying is dead) is that the point of writing assignments is to test your knowledge and abilities on the particular subject you're supposed to be writing about, not testing your ability to cut'n'paste and change a few words. Plagiarizing is just lazy, if you're going to go through the work to search for a good article to copy, change it around so that it won't be detected, and then sweat it out hoping no one discovers your laziness, why not just read some real sources and write the paper yourself? That is, unless you can't understand the material well enough to write a decent paper ... in which case you shouldn't pass the course!

wilco said 7:27PM on 3-31-2007

"I don't see what is wrong with "plagiarizing" when the person is dead anyways."

Haha wow, just . . . wow.

Daniel Turner said 7:28PM on 3-31-2007

This isn't work for hire, since the school isn't paying you. And they'll probably win, since there's no substantial non-infringing use of the service - every single paper uploaded is written by a copyright holder, and the uploader is never the copyright holder. Hence the only use of the service is to infringe copyright. Even if you were under contract with your university to ascribe to them an interest in your copyrighted material, these are high school students, who are under no such contract.

Judicata said 7:28PM on 3-31-2007

Those responses stink of second year law student.

dan turner said 7:36PM on 3-31-2007

Judicata - thanks for the ad hom about my comment. I'm not in law school, actually, but I appreciate the insult anyhow. You're implying that what I wrote is wrong, but you haven't taken the time to offer any arguments. It must be nice to participate in discourse in such a way as to ensure your fragile little ego isn't bruised by being shown to be wrong.

Mythor said 8:28PM on 3-31-2007

They address the copyright issues on their site (links on this page: http://turnitin.com/static/company.html ) but it's pretty much a disgrace.
I looked it up to get their spider to stop crawling the pages of my site and, presumably, saving copies, since there's no way in hell I give permission for them to use my content for the benefit of their business. I'd have to mount a legal challenge against them though, so in the end I just blocked them via .htaccess...

Best of luck to the students. I seriously doubt they're going to win because Turnitin's lawyers will just make it seem like the students just want to plagiarise their papers and are not really concerned about the usage of the material they do in fact have every legal right to insist not be used in this fashion.

chris said 8:40AM on 4-02-2007

I think people don't understand the word copyright -
the exclusive right to make copies, license, and otherwise exploit a literary, musical, or artistic work, whether printed, audio, video, etc.: works granted such right by law on or after January 1, 1978, are protected for the lifetime of the author or creator and for a period of 50 years after his or her death. (yes I plagiarized that from dictionary.com, so sue me)

So, basically, if the piece of work was truly copyrighted than they are in trouble legally. Ironically many of these students have probably downloaded music of the internet, but that's not what we are focusing on.

No matter how you cut it the company is making some money off of CHILDREN. What's worse is that the children aren't even getting paid for helping make this service as good as it is. Do the children have no rights or legal recognition?

I think the problem is that the laws aren't setup yet for this, as with many things on the "tubes".

Secondly, just copying a section of a piece of material is NOT copyright infringement as long as you give credit to the author. If the child quoted from another source, another paper, then that should be sufficient, while not the best.

James said 7:56AM on 4-03-2007

Not sure I get this -- how is it that Google can index a site (presumably "storing" all its content in a database) and let people search that, for a profit, and it's kosher... but if this anti-cheating site indexes papers written by other people, and stores them in a database, and lets teachers search the database, for a profit, that's a copyright violation? The big difference I can see is that the authors of the papers never gave permission to put their work into electronic form, but then the authors of web content never gave explicit permission for Google to host their works either. So I'm confused. I see the anti-cheating database as clear-cut fair use. I haven't read a lot about it, but I don't imagine there's a way for people to just rummage through the database and read stuff.

Anyway, I think the actual argument used in the end will be that all material submitted to the school becomes property of the school. Never mind that the students HAVE to go to the school (if they're under age, and can't afford/won't attend a private school or home school); never mind that they HAVE to submit papers in order to pass. If the government can compel you to pay for the school, and compel your kids to go to the school, they can damn well confiscate your creative works without recompense. That's what you get for funding a one-size-fits-all required school system. Live with it, or vote for vouchers.

Mike said 9:51PM on 4-03-2007

The issue here is not about students wanting to plagiarize. It's about Turnitin making profit off of students' intellectual property. I wrote some pretty damn good papers in high school and college and I would be pretty annoyed if Turnitin was making money off of them while I wasn't.

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