Just a note from the Chronicle of Higher Ed: Turnitin has now triumphed a second time in a copyright infringement lawsuit. The suit was brought by students who claimed that Turnitin's storing and making commercial use of their essays was a copyright infringement.
However a US district court, agreeing with a local court's decision, found in favor of Turnitin. Here's the key paragraph from the Chronicle post:
U.S. District Court Judge Claude M. Hilton had found that scanning the
student papers to detect plagiarism is a “highly transformative” use
that falls under the fair-use provision of copyright law. Mr. Hilton
ruled that the company “makes no use of any work’s particular
expressive or creative content beyond the limited use of comparison
with other works,” and that the new use “provides a substantial public
benefit.”
Somehow the court's decision sounds right to a lay person like me. The interesting question is the judgment that the Turnitin use “provides a substantial public
benefit.” I tend to agree with that, but would be curious as to what others think.
If "substantial public benefit" can be counted in dollars and cents, than I suppose the size of their subscriber pool could determine that. Whoever's paying for it must deem it beneficial, right?
Though I have minimal knowledge of the lawsuit details, it does strike me as a bit silly. The strength of turnitin lies in its ability to detect plagiarism, and that ability is pretty minimal without a body of work to make comparisons against.
Hmmm...now there is a case in which I might have sympathy for the plaintiffs. I was thinking of turnitin use as voluntary, but what if a prof *requires* students to run their papers through turnitin? Is that fair, given the storing and future use of their work?
Posted by: LCB | April 22, 2009 at 04:42 PM