Turnitin Deemed Legal

HMTKSteve

Plagiarism screener gets passing grade in copyright lawsuit

Even if the contract hadn't been binding, the decision concluded that the use of student submissions for plagiarism detection fell well within the bounds of fair use. Citing the Perfect 10 vs. Google case, Hilton found that iParadigm's use of the students' essays was transformative and valuable. In contrast, student essays in their normal form were viewed as having no market, and their reuse by turnitin did not in any way diminish the students' "incentive for creativity"—namely, their grades.

If they are saying there is no market for term papers does that mean that no one buys and sells term papers? If these term papers have no real market value why do they keep copies of them in their database?

I am against this service based on principal. I do not like being forced into a third party "click-wrap" contract. This is a case of a student having no other option but agreeing to the contract in order to have their paper graded.

I can accept the checking of the paper against Internet content and papers that have been explicitly allowed to remain in their database but not all papers ever submitted for checking.

What if a student wrote a paper for a class and then dropped out or flunked the class. what if that same student took the class again and used the original paper as a basis for their new paper, would they be caught as plagiarising themselves? Would the report specifically say whose paper they plagiarised?

I think what scares me most is the judge's view of contract law as applied to this case.

lackofcheese

Such cases are merely fringe demonstrations of the overall fact that copyright is just made of fail.

Here's how this kind of thing, in my opinion, should work.
There should be no problem with the service iParadigms provides; storing copies of term papers should be legal even without a "click-wrap" contract.
Using this kind of service to check for plagiarism isn't bad either, but in conjunction with this, skilled human attention is required to really work out what is plagiarism and what is not.

I'd recommend to read this article, The Promise of a Post-Coypright World by Karl Fogel.

Sail

This is fucking bullshit. It always pisses me off when I have to turn something in to turnitin.com because I know that they're using intellectual property without permission.

I can accept the checking of the paper against Internet content and papers that have been explicitly allowed to remain in their database but not all papers ever submitted for checking.

Exactly. I have read their ToS several times, and no where does it state that by submitting your paper you are giving your consent for them to make money off of it. I've attached a CC license with non-commercialism checked with every paper I turn into this site to protect me should I ever get involved in one of these lawsuits against them in my later years.

HMTKSteve

What would happen if instead of using spaces between words you used letters the same color as the background? It would be readable by a human but a computer would see the "invisible" letters and choke on it.

lackofcheese

Hah, a CC license, very good plan Sail.

Under current law, I certainly would agree that what they're doing shouldn't be allowed. If a law exists, then it should be applied fairly.
However, since I believe that copyright law shouldn't be there at all, I also hold that this sort of thing should be allowed.

Please note that when I say copyright should be removed, I'm holding copyright as a very distinct issue from plagiarism. Even though under current law plagiarism is part of copyright, things should not be this way. It generates a *lot* of problems you can read about on QuestionCopyright.org.

Copyright is the right to control copies of your work, while plagiarism is a failure to give credit, so the two issues are rather distinct.


In fact, the common conflation of the two might play a part in why TurnItIn are getting away with it. If you read their statement on Fair Use, their claim is based around the fact that they are "protecting" the student's copyright. However, they are only protecting against plagiarism, which is in fact a rather narrow area of copyright, and one which, as I just said, shouldn't be part of it at all.

whatever

What would happen if instead of using spaces between words you used letters the same color as the background? It would be readable by a human but a computer would see the "invisible" letters and choke on it.

Brilliant!

lackofcheese

What would happen if instead of using spaces between words you used letters the same color as the background? It would be readable by a human but a computer would see the "invisible" letters and choke on it.

HMTKSteve, your plan is pretty awesome too, though if someone copied it, *including* the lettered blanks, the system would detect it

HMTKSteve

What would happen if instead of using spaces between words you used letters the same color as the background? It would be readable by a human but a computer would see the "invisible" letters and choke on it.

HMTKSteve, your plan is pretty awesome too, though if someone copied it, *including* the lettered blanks, the system would detect it

What if they changed all of the lettered blanks?

lackofcheese

Heh, nice, now I'm ashamed I didn't think of that.

Dkong

What would happen if instead of using spaces between words you used letters the same color as the background? It would be readable by a human but a computer would see the "invisible" letters and choke on it.

Heh, I'm totally doing that on my next paper.

Would the report specifically say whose paper they plagiarised?

From what my teachers have told me, yes, the reports include detailed info on what paper you plagiarized, including author names.


Also, if you put quotes around something, it won't pop up as plagiarized, since it's assuming you're giving credit to whatever you quoted.

Annnnnd to top it off, the paper I turn into my teachers is usually different than the copy I turn in online....yeah.

lackofcheese

The best way to do it would likely be some kind of simple macro that would change any space to a random invisible character.
Then you could have a re-randomizer that would pluck out all the invisible characters and re-randomize them.

Annnnnd to top it off, the paper I turn into my teachers is usually different than the copy I turn in online....yeah.

I don't entirely see what you're talking about there .

Dkong

I don't entirely see what you're talking about there .

Well, 99% of the time, my teachers want a hard copy in their hands and a copy on turnitin.com. I'll turn in one on tii, then I'll make some kinda-shady changes to my paper, print it out, then hand it in in class.

Yes, I could get fucked if my teachers checked papers against the online papers. Usually, they won't since they have like 150 papers at a time to deal with.


Then again, I rarely plagiarize. I have more fun just making shit up.

Apreche

The invisible character trick is clever, but almost too clever for its own good. Your word processor will think it is just one big word. You will lose spell check and word wrap.

lackofcheese

Well, if you set it up like I said before, you could type everything in with spaces, normal style, and then afterwards it would be a simple matter of replacing (using the nice simple tool you've set up for yourself) every space character with a random invisible letter.

Apreche

Well, if you set it up like I said before, you could type everything in with spaces, normal style, and then afterwards it would be a simple matter of replacing (using the nice simple tool you've set up for yourself) every space character with a random invisible letter.

Alright, but what file format are we talking about here?

lackofcheese

Well, it's likely that with an advanced word processing application you would need to use macros within the application rather than some kind of external method to achieve this, but it's still alright.

If you have something that stores files in some screwed up format but doesn't give you the tools to make a decent macro or something; well, then it's not so easy.

...

since it's assuming you're giving credit to whatever you quoted

The invisible character trick is clever, but almost too clever for its own good. Your word processor will think it is just one big word. You will lose spell check and word wrap.

Invisible quote as the very first and very last character of your paper.
Done!