Students Settle With TurnItIn In Copyright Case 208
An anonymous reader writes "With the deadline for a Supreme Court appeal rapidly approaching, the students who sued TurnItIn.com for issues surrounding copyright infringement reached a settlement with the site's company on Friday. Now the search goes out for any student who has a paper which is being held by TurnItIn that they did not upload themselves. If your teacher uploaded a paper and ran a TurnItIn report without your permission, I bet the students' attorney would like to hear from you."
Re:Always did wonder (Score:5, Informative)
They obviously have to hold copies of works that were not uploaded by the original authors to compare this stuff to. Are they not in mass violation of copyright?
No. Go read the standard of fair use again.
"Academic purposes" are one of the black-letter exemptions. If this were a college doing the bundle and offering it for-free to all participants, instead of a private company making a buck, this wouldn't even be a problem.
Re:how do i find out if my teacher did that? (Score:1, Informative)
If you are a student, and you suspect that a particular paper was submitted without your consent, contact the attorney and confidentially provide him with your paper.
If you are a TEACHER, and your school uses this service, and you think that it would benefit everyone to get a ruling on the legality of such a service, contact the attorney and offer to help,
With the combination of a student and a teacher, a test can be run on a PARAGRAPH from the paper in question, If it gets flagged as plagiarism, then the teacher can request that the paper gets emailed to him/her. This would provide the attorney with a test case for another challenge of this service.
Re:how do i find out if my teacher did that? (Score:4, Informative)
it was on the anon-a-blog. ravar@nixonvan.com Bob Vanderhye, 703-442-0422.
I think TurnItIn's strategy is to make the schools make the students submit the papers (and agree to the terms). Many students have successfully challenged their teachers and their schools, saying that this requirement to submit to a PERMANENT ARCHIVE is wrong.
Re:Who is really hurt by such services? (Score:3, Informative)
My minor was in the humanities, and it was a bit of a mixed bag for me. A couple professors required us to have citations for everything in our papers. Most notably ethics, where I wasn't even allowed to talk about what my thoughts on Aristotle's ethics were, I had to have citations reporting what other people thought about it.
Of course, that professor got turned down for tenure.
Re:how do i find out if my teacher did that? (Score:5, Informative)
>>> she reserves the right to upload it as she sees fit. The student agrees to the contract
This contract would be declared "void" in a court-of-law, just the same as various provisions in the Paypal User Agreement were declared void a few years ago. Why? Because contracts can not be used to sign-away rights protected by Federal Consumer Protection laws. In other words, a company (college) can not force a customer (student) to give-up his rights or privileges as a precondition of service,
Nor can a company add conditions AFTER the money has already been paid, which would be the case if a customer does not see the prof's syllabus until the first day. That's called bait-and-switch.