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September 29, 2006
Before I moved away from the Bay Area, I worked briefly at the downtown Oakland technology startup iParadigms, writing and editing various web pages and marketing materials. This is the company that runs Turnitin, a web-based plagiarism-checking service that allows subscriber educational institutions to check student work against a vast database of web and print sources, as well as against all other student papers that have ever been run through the system. The company contracts with thousands of public and private institutions, and makes a pretty penny for its efforts.
Turnitin has been criticized on numerous counts, mostly by students who feel like the system is part of a Big Brother climate of mistrust. In particular, though, the feature of checking student papers against other papers that have already been run through the system has led to a popular criticism that the system violates student copyrights. I was given the task of writing some replies to student newspapers that had editorialized against the system. With the new school year, the number of students protesting the system has again increased, and some of them even got the Washington Post to write about it. For all the puffery, though, it's an entirely new question of copyright law as to whether this system would constitute a copyright violation, and so I don't think anyone can really say. It's very interesting to me from a legal perspective. While I worked there, I did a lot of research into cheating and realized that it actually is a huge, huge problem in the Internet age. Also, I noted that the people who created the system and ran the company were not KBR surveillance experts; they were free-thinking academics who were pissed about cheating when they were grad students teaching undergrad classes. They felt like the level of digital plagiarism going on actually impacted the quality of university education all over the country. It seems to me that the best argument on Turnitin's side is that students give teachers a license to read and evaluate their work in numerous ways when they turn it in for grading. Some of these ways would technically be considered copyright violations. For instance, a teacher could make a copy of a paper to give to a grad student grader, or the teacher could make a copy of a paper to place in a file to check against other student work in the future. None of these things would seem to be actionable. So is a private company maintaining a database of these papers, performing checks that teachers would do if they could, and getting paid for it, actionable? In a private school context, definitely not, because students agree to be bound by numerous private school rules as soon as they matriculate. In a public school context, I think it's a much closer question, because the public school is an instrumentality of the government. Could there be an eminent domain claim, that the student had been deprived of property without compensation? |