Fair Use Affirmed In Turnitin Case

Hugh Pickens writes "The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has issued an opinion affirming a ruling that will be cheered by digital fair use proponents for allowing a fair use of students' work when their teachers electronically file students' written work with the turnitin.com Web site so that newly submitted work can be compared against Turnitin's database of existing student work to assess whether the new work is the result of plagiarism. The court stepped through the fair use analysis, dropping positive notes that affirm commercial uses can be fair uses, that a use can be transformative 'in function or purpose without altering or actually adding to the original work,' and that the entirety of a work can be used without precluding a finding of fair use. Techdirt suggests that all of these points could have been helpful to Google in defending its book scanning efforts, 'since it could make pretty much the identical arguments on all points.' Unfortunately Google caved in that lawsuit and settled, 'denying a strong fair use precedent and making Google look like an easy place for struggling industries to demand cash.'"

The Difference Is Chutzpah

[krsmav]

IAAL. IMHO, the TurnItIn case won't have much effect on other fair use cases. This was a made up, test case, in which a couple of high school kids and their parents claimed that any attempt to detect their plagiarism by comparing their papers with others violated their copyrights in their own [plagiarized] work. Their chutzpah got the result it deserved. Any lawyer smart enough to be a judge can write a convincing, or at least consistent, opinion on either side of a case. Don't expect the TurnItIn case to make much difference where the copyright owner has a plausible claim.

Re:What fair use? It's not even published.

[Again]

These works were never published. Therefore they should not be subjected to the same expectation that an author cannot completely control his work. These are all stolen unpublished works. They are the student's private papers. Defenses based on copyright shouldn't even be applicable.

What are you talking about? If you create something, you own it. If you write a paper then you own the copyright to that work whether or not you choose to publish it. Publishing your work does not make your copyright claim any stronger.

Re:Google Case Completely Different

[Todd Knarr]

I'm afraid Google doesn't distribute the works they scan. They store copies of the works, use them for searching, and display at most a sentence or two where they found the match with the search terms along with a link to someone who does sell copies of the work.

Re:Plagiarism takes yet another hit

[DrLang21]

And lets face it, despite the high horse many students get on, most student's don't have much originality. If a teacher has been teaching the same class for 5 years, 3 semesters a year, how much original work do you really expect? I imagine many of the reports would look almost identical.

Re:Plagiarism takes yet another hit

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nonsense. There is ALWAYS means for a student to appeal. Always. There is an informal process (ask to speak to the Dean), and a formal academic appeal process (usually with a committee that includes student representatives). The prof is not the final word.

And if an innocent student who is falsely accused is too lazy or frightened to stand up for their rights, well, that's really unfortunate. Because the means to do so are always there when a prof makes a mistake, as they sometimes do.

Re:Economic impact

[Comboman]

It is true that not all plagiarism involves copyright infringement (for example, plagiarizing from the public domain, or with permission of the author as in your example). However, once you transfer the copyright of your paper to someone else (who passes it in as their own), you no longer own the copyright and cannot resell it to another student. It would be pretty hard to make money off that business model unless you sell each paper for a lot of money. Reminds me of the scene in the Rodney Dangerfield classic "Back to School" in which Dangerfield's character pays Kurt Vonnegut (playing himself in a cameo) to write a college paper on his own book. It gets a failing grade.

Re:Plagiarism takes yet another hit

[Saysys]

I got screwed in a graduate course by turnitin because i used CIA world fact book to source my variables and instead of, after each variable, writing the exact same source I did so after all of the variables.

long story short, the stupid machine said i stole my stuff from some other web-page that mirrors fact-book and i got a C in the grad course.

Re:Plagiarism takes yet another hit

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry.

Citation:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/21/1736254&art_pos=5