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."
Always did wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
I always did wonder how these plagiarism detection things were able to legally continue to operate. 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? Are not the teachers who uploaded this stuff at least as guilty as file sharers, I mean after all, my term papers from college are way more useful than a new tune from Bittany.
Re:Who is really hurt by such services? (Score:5, Insightful)
But my intelligence isn't proved in some one-time essay. It's all about how I create real solutions for real problems.
If you are incapable of taking a task, and expressing the solutition to said task in written form, then you're essentially sub-literate. Unless you're an astonishing genius, you're just a drain on your company due to your inability.
College doesn't test, train, or reward INTELLIGENCE. It tests, trains, and rewards LEARNING and ABILITY -- which are three very, very different things.
Choosing to bypass testing is the right answer, no matter what the question.
God, I would love to work for your competitor. "Sir, BadAnalogyGuy's company is beating us!" "Ok, just file a complaint. I'm sure that semi-literate guy did something wrong enough to slap them down."
Re:Who is really hurt by such services? (Score:3, Insightful)
Classic Moment from the Appeal (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't quote it exactly... but when he made the point, nearly EVERY head nodded, including the three appellate judges. It was one of those made-for-TV moments. This was right around the time of the US Presidential election:
something like "You can bet if Barack Obama's or Sarah Palin's high school papers were stored on the *most secure server* on the internet, they would have been hacked. There's no doubt that a site with the lax security of TurnItIn would be hacked."
Man, ya shoulda been there!
Re:Who is really hurt by such services? (Score:2, Insightful)
I always saw it as testing and rewarding obedience, and the submission to allowing strangers to set your goals and priorities and otherwise to direct your efforts, to take on their tasks as if they were your own with a diligence that lasts well into what would otherwise be your personal time. To me this is the trait college tests which employers would find desirable in terms of obedient workers who don't raise a fuss and are relatively easy to manage. Innate ability determines whether you must focus on the task itself or the willingness to complete it, and learning just means you can more readily incorporate this unwritten lesson. Otherwise, very little that I've seen of formal education (in any form) had to do with testing your personal limits or expanding your mind or pushing your boundaries. The emphasis on rote as opposed to arrival by experience is evidence enough of this fact.
Totally Unfair! (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright law is supposed to protect corporations from potential customers. It is not meant to be used to protect authors from corporations. This is a perfectly honest corporation advancing its agenda by innocently infringing the copyright of authors. Corporations are supposed to get unequal protection under the law. How this court could see fit to apply the law equally in this case is beyond me.
/sarcasm
Re:Talk to your professor, opt out (Score:5, Insightful)
they had no issue with me opting out
You do not have to, and should not have to, opt out of your creative works being infringed.
The only reason that they used it was because the department head dictated it.
If the department dictated that the professor should take your laptop, sell it on eBay, and give the money to some third party corporation, would you see the professor as having done no wrong? This corporation is building its cashflow on your creative work, without license. If they want to come to you and negotiate a deal to use your creative work in their business model, fine. Until then, it is yours.
Re:Who is really hurt by such services? (Score:1, Insightful)
"Ok, just file a complaint. I'm sure that semi-literate guy did something wrong enough to slap them down."
I love how the Americans think that suing everybody is the best solution for every problem.
Re:Who is really hurt by such services? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Your posting history is all the evidence we need.
Re:But is this REALLY copyright infringement? (Score:3, Insightful)
How are they going to claim that a work by the student is copyrighted by the university? If they were paying me a salary then I could see it, but they're not. I'm paying for the education, so it's mine.
Re:But is this REALLY copyright infringement? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Who is really hurt by such services? (Score:5, Insightful)
Testing is not perfect but it does have a useful purpose. Yes, everybody is unique blah, blah, but there are millions of students at all levels in the USA and you got to classify them somehow by ability, so what method do you propose? The right answer is to keep improving the testing methods, not to bypass testing. A good test should present something like real world problems and take into account the difference in priorities for engineering students, versus, say English students etc. And by the way, the ability to communicate, including in writing, is very important even for nerds.
Re:Talk to your professor, opt out (Score:3, Insightful)
Aren't you a precious little snowflake? I assume your parents are big donors to the school.
Actually, I was a broke as shit college student paying my own tuition by working 60 hours a week on top of being a full time student so I wouldn't fall into unmanageable debt. I live by my principles and my convictions, when those are violated I act to correct them. Taking 10 minutes out of my day to right a wrong certainly isn't going to kill me, though it may inconvenience me.
The profs should given you two options - put up and shut up, or an F. I suspect most teachers have better uses for their time than googling random phrases, especially when the college is already paying for an automated method.
Professors get paid by my check every semester. They are there because students like me say they can be. I suspect that they felt it is worth letting one student opt out than it would be to fight it. Sure, they may already be paying for he automated response, but this article mentioned a lawsuit which is nearly ironclad in that students are in fact having their rights violated. Do you think that colleges have a standing order to willfully disregard student's wishes in regards to an already murky legal area? It wouldn't make sense; they'd accept my wishes to opt out, spend the extra time, and go on with their lives.
Re:Who is really hurt by such services? (Score:2, Insightful)
You went to the wrong college then. Or maybe just had a liberal arts degree.
Try an actual science education.
Re:Always did wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
I assume you're referring to the fact that it would be an infringement if someone sold photocopied knockoff textbooks?
Get back to us when Turnitin start buying and selling essays. By essays I mean the full text in its entirety. Not excerpts, not metadata, not statistics derived from them.
Re:Who is really hurt by such services? (Score:3, Insightful)
You went to the wrong college then. Or maybe just had a liberal arts degree.
Try an actual science education.
I refer not to subject matter but rather to the methods by which they teach and the spirit in which that is done.
Albert Einstein captured the essence of which I speak in a single sentence: "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
Re:Who is really hurt by such services? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Talk to your professor, opt out (Score:3, Insightful)
"That implies that there are times you should choose not to fight or choose a less confrontational approach."
Only if you're being reasonable.
Re:Always did wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
yes, but this wouldn't work as well. turnitin intends to catch running a paper through a theosaurus or rewriting the occasional sentence/paragraph. Change a single letter and you defeat hashing
Re:how do i find out if my teacher did that? (Score:4, Insightful)
And what about the more common case of being a student who was forced to upload things to turnitin or fail the class? Sounds like a pretty big bloody loophole to leave considering how easily schools can find various ways of blackmailing a student into "voluntarily" doing things.
Re:how do i find out if my teacher did that? (Score:3, Insightful)
My wife is an English professor at a large research university. Her syllabus, which is effectively the contract between her and the student, states that she reserves the right to upload it as she sees fit. The student agrees to the contract by remaining in the class (this is the view of the university's lawyers).
So if there's anything like that in your syllabus, you're probably out of luck. "I didn't read the syllabus" is not going to be a successful legal argument. "I had to take the course to graduate" might get you farther, but it can usually be shown that there were other classes that would have fulfilled that requirement.
Re:how do i find out if my teacher did that? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well of course it's wrong. Suppose that one of those students if the next Roddenberry (Star Trek), JMS (Babylon 5), or Joss Whedon (Buffy/Angel/Firefly) and said student created a great story for his class. Why should this student have to give-up his copyrights to some asshole company?
This is just another way that corporations seek to steal ideas, stories, songs from artisans by takng-over control of the copyrights.
Re:how do i find out if my teacher did that? (Score:4, Insightful)
Thank god your wife doesn't teach where I go to school, most of us don't put up with that kind of crap and will drop the class before the first period is over.
What a crock! And if her class is a requirement for graduation and happens to be the only session being taught in a given semester, I'd be willing to wager you would get a lot of complaints. B.T.W. does she states this in her syllabus clearly, or do you wait until someone complains and then bring in the lawyers?
Re:how do i find out if my teacher did that? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or a student could add a copyright notice granting the teacher the non-exclusive right to upload the paper, but reserving all other rights including the right to do anything more than store the paper once uploaded. In other words, comply with exactly the letter of the 'contract' but make sure it's worthless.
It does seem interesting to me that at least in theory, the student is the customer and is certainly the one that pays, but their work gets treated as a work for hire.
Re:how do i find out if my teacher did that? (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>Sounds like bunkum to me.
No it isn't bunkum that the U.S. Courts declared various sections of Paypal's contract "void" since the contract violated federal laws. Similarly a professor that demands a student give-up his rights is also in violation of these laws. For example the professor can not say in his syllabus, "You lose all right to sue me for sexual harassment."
Yeah I know I used an extreme example, but so did you with your anti-gun argument. The point is that there are some rights/privileges than can Not be given-away via contract, because the U.S. laws supercede the contract. One of those rights is copyright. A business like Walmart can not force a customer to give-up his stories as a condition of service. Neither can XYZ College.
Another right is to not have terms added to a contract AFTER the money has already been paid by the customer. That's a breach by the business. For example Walmart can't suddenly tell me, after I bought some Levis jeans, that I am only allowed to wear them on weekend. Neither can a professor arbitarily add terms after payment has been submitted.
Such things must be revealed *before* the money changes hands.
Re:how do i find out if my teacher did that? (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>Want to buy a car? Arbitration and liability waiver.
Yes and virtually all of those have been declared void in court. For example a lot of these arbitration contracts claim the customer MUST go through arbitration and abide by the arbiter's ruling. They also say the customer may not challenge the result in court. Time-and-time again the courts have nullified these contracts, and stated that the customer may sue a company at any time, without being bound to arbitration, per U.S. law.
But companies keep making us sign these contracts, because they know deception is effective, and most customers falsely-believe they are bound by this waiver. But it isn't true. Consumer rights can not be signed-away.
The same applies with the company called college. A professor has a little more flexibility, but he still can not force someone to sign-away their Federally-protected rights. For example suppose the professor never appeared in class, but instead set-up a TV to watch Cartoon Network, per the first-day's syllabus. You mean to tell me the university is protected from being sued by the ~30 students that paid tuition, but were never taught? Hardly.
You're a customer. You retain all your consumer rights per U.S. law.
Re:Who is really hurt by such services? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you read up on the history of higher education, you'd understand that the systems referred to by Einstein in that quote (late 19th/early 20th century) essentially no longer exist. Today's system, at least in decent schools, lets you get out of it what you want. I'd say 70% of the student population in the school I went to was there to finish a BS in four-five years, while putting in as little effort and as much beer as possible. They'd plagiarize, cheat, or do anything else to get by. What they got back was a half-assed education, filled with exactly the sort of problems you descibe.
For a few of us it was a little bit different. By my junior year I was working 20+ hours a week as a paid assistant in a biochemistry lab, working closely with grad students, post-docs, & the profs (as well as a half-dozen other undergrad RAs). I rolled out of there with a fantastic science education, a strong network of professional connections that I continue to use today, 16 hours of transferrable gradute school coursework, and a level of comfort of how to work in a lab that made grad school actually fun.
The point is, the higher education system in which students can receive an individualized education delivering a high level of training in a technically challenging field does exist; actually it co-exists with the beer-swilling do-the-least-possible-work system. You just have to 1) be a little bit talented, 2) be willing to work your ass off, and 3) show some initiative.