Skip to Content

Submit your nominations for the Luxist Awards' Best in Decor
AOL Tech

turnitin posts

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, News

Court: Turnitin does not violate student copyrights by scanning homework

Turnitin
A judge has thrown out a suit filed by a group of students who claimed that the anti-plagiarism software Turnitin violated student copyrights. Turnitin scans student papers to determine the likelihood that they were plagiarized, and saves a copy in a database to make it easier to detect fraudulent papers in the future. But the students said iParadigms, the company behind Turnitin was essentially using their works without permission, which amounts to copyright infringement.

The judge presiding over the case ruled that since iParadigms does not republish the stories and "makes no use of any work's particular expressive or creative content beyond the limited use of comparison with other works." Therefore, the judge decided that the whole thing falls under "fair use." There's also the fact that the students kind of, sort of give permission for their papers to be scanned. Really what happens it that schools and teachers decide to use the system and students who don't want to feed their papers into a big computer can refuse to turn them in and take an F. Not really much of a choice, is it?

[via Techdirt]

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, News

Students sue anti-plagiarism site for copyright infringement

Turnitin
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]

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

View more Time Wasters

Featured Galleries

Defective by Design, London: Protest Pictures
Microsoft Security Essentials
Chromium Pre-Alpha on CrunchBang Linux
Safari 4 Beta
10 Firefox themes that don't suck
IE8 RC1
Download Squad at the Crunchies After-Party
Download Squad at the Crunchies
WordPress 2.7
Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals
Windows 7 Hands On
Comodo Internet Security
Android First-look: Amazon.com MP3 Store
Android First-look: Twitroid
Google Reader Android
Android Hands-On
Twine 1.0
Photoshop Express Beta
Mozilla Birthday Cake
Palm stuff
Adobe Lightroom 1.1

 


Follow us on Twitter!

Flickr Pool

www.flickr.com

More Tech Coverage

AOL Radio