Students sue Turnitin.comFollow

I'd assume he meant that Turnitin flags the identical text and the instructor can use his own judgement to decide from context what the student intended. As opposed to not knowing that the phrases were lifted in the first place.

I just had a thought.

It's almost worth buying a subscription and offering a score for all Gbaji posts.

Hmmmmm

A look over the Turnitin.com website and brochures doesn't show it ever suggesting intent but rather a simple percentage analysis of how much of the paper it thinks was lifted from other sources.

I don't think the service ever suggests intent and that was something the quoted teacher added on his own.

I fully endorse the idea of you grading Gbaji's posts.

A look over the Turnitin.com website and brochures doesn't show it ever suggesting intent but rather a simple percentage analysis of how much of the paper it thinks was lifted from other sources.

Indeed. I was, alas, wrong.

I can accept that in subjects not involving 200 foot tall robot pimpyness.

If it isn't done in class, don't assign much weight to it. If you want to do something you can't do in class (big research project) there is very little to prevent cheating (of the kind this service can and cannot find).

From Sam's post:


That is just so sad.

In science, there are two things you have to do to push forward your field: one - do good work, two - communicate what you have done to others. Very few people are good at both. You are going to end up with specialized knowledge which you have to transmit to others. In very brief spans of time.

Sure, this may be sort of specific to science - at least in the past - but I think in the future many fields will end up this way. It is called the new "knowledge based" economy, after all. Of course, that could all wash away and we could be, I don't know, painting or designing or doing highly individualized tasks I can't comprehend.

I think that the legal issue isn't so much with whether turnitin.com can do what they are doing, but whether it's legal for the school(s) to require that students sign a waiver giving away their rights to their work.

Without looking too deeply into it, my admittedly knee-jerk reaction is that the students don't have much of a case. It's not uncommon at all for contracts to involve the waiving of ownership rights. For example, the company I work for essentially owns the copywrite/patent for anything I do while I'm working for them. Now, that may be seen as reasonable in a workplace environment since you get paid for you work (so the company "owns" it, not you), but perhaps not reasonable in a school environment. I'm not so sure though. In a school you provide work and money and in return recieve a grade and degree (which presumably has value). Thus, it's still a contract just like any other.

My understanding is that in cases like that if the use of the material is reasonable to the contracted relationship between the parties, the requirement for a waiver is legitimate. So. It would be unreasonable for the school to require students to waive their rights to their work and then use that work for profit (ie: selling or publishing the work for cash payment). However, it *is* within the reasonable scope of a school to use that work to ensure the quality of education that they provide. Since finding and preventing plagarism is a legitimate goal for an educational institution in the context of improving that education (a school which allows plagarism could theoretically lose their accredidation), it would seem like this would be a legitimate use of the material, and thus a legitimate cause for waiver.


The only other real issue is the cost involved. However, that's also well covered. You can provide a "service" to access copywrited material without having the copywrite itself. This is done with directory services all the time. You're charging people for your time and effort assembling the information and making it accessable to the customer, not for the content of the information itself. It may seem like a fine line, but in this case I don't think there's much argument that it's being abused. It's not like the service is some secret cover for a business to steal written work from people and then charge other's to read it for the value of the works themselves. The payment and service exist in order to ensure that what a student wrote *isn't* something that already exists. Unless they can find that those paying for the service are using it in order to read the papers for their own inherent value, you can't find "damages" that have been done to the students (they didn't lose money because no one would have paid to read their work for it's own value).


I'd be surprised if the case gets very far...

As you say though, if they are minors then their "rights" in this case fall to their parents. Presumably, somewhere in all the papers that they signed at the begining of the school year included the very waiver that has been mentioned a few times before. If they don't like that, they need to take it up with their parents, not sue the company.

Assuming they are minors, then asking that it not be submitted is invalid, since the parent and not the student would need to do that and it would not be considered valid either since it would be a request in violation of a written agreement. Kinda like if you fill out a credit card application in which the small print says "I agree to allow everything I purchase to be tracked and used by the company for their own purposes", you recieve the credit card, then scribble on a reciept at a PoS "Not authorized to enter this purchase into your tracking database".

Just see how far you get with that one...


Again. You have to show that the work in question is being used in a manner in violation with the agreement they entered into. In this case, the only "value" their work has is in the database when used as a check for plagarism. Now, if they can show that if only they owned the rights to that work, they could sell it and make 150,000 dollars per paper, they might just have a case.

Somehow I dont think so though.