Fair Use Affirmed In Turnitin Case 315
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.'"
Plagiarism takes yet another hit (Score:5, Funny)
Plagiarism takes yet another hit (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Plagiarism takes yet another hit (Score:5, Funny)
This is extremely bad news for lazy students everywhere. Won't someone please think of the plagiarists? :)
Re:Plagiarism takes yet another hit (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Plagiarism takes yet another hit (Score:5, Funny)
Hey I found 3 references so it must be true that this is extremely bad news for lazy students everywhere.
You're missing a citation, you plagiarist.
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[citation needed]
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This is extremely bad news for lazy students everywhere. Won't someone please think of the plagiarists? :)
Re:Plagiarism takes yet another hit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Plagiarism takes yet another hit (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah, it's brought in with good intentions - to flag suspicious work for manual review. In practice I imagine it would slip to being used as a lazy shortcut to banhammer students with no recourse or appeal. Other posters will probably fill in the examples.
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Certainly no disciplinary action should be taken unless plagarism can be proven.
Turnitin is not disciplinary action. If the turnitin report comes back indicating plagarism, then the instructor investigates using the turnitin report and then takes disciplinary action. Many papers come back flagged by turnitin, but they are often false positives (quotations, commonly used phrases, etc.) Any university that doesn't require some additional effort on the part of the instructor is a joke.
My point is, if a student feels that the instructor doesn't trust him/her to be honest on an assignment, how can he/she in turn trust that instructor to be fair in other things?
That's a bit of leap in logic. For the sake of argument, suppose that requiring turnitin.com submissi
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If the instructor reads a paper and thinks "that is very similar to one I got last semester" then it is okay for him to check, do you agree? (this would be the "something about a specific paper calls it into suspicion" part). So the instructors brain can run the diff command. But if the instructor automates the process and
Re:Plagiarism takes yet another hit (Score:5, Insightful)
If the instructor is reading my paper with the intent of 'diff'-ing it against previous works, no matter what the mechanism, then the trust has already been destroyed. The paper should be read for content, clarity, etc., and if, during that process, something jumps out as familiar or unusual for a certain student's typical work, then there's grounds for further investigation.
By analogy: Let's say girls have cheated on me in the past, and I decided that I would really prefer that didn't occur again, so I'm now regularly searching my new girlfriend's e-mail/phone for incriminating messages. I'd say our relationship is already in a sad state, and it barely even matters if she's actually cheating or not. The trust was broken long before I logged on---and not because of anything she did. That's TurnItIn.
On the other hand, if I just grab her phone to make a call and find a risque incoming text, then I might have a reason for further exploration now, but prior to this incident, I believed her to be faithful/innocent and our relationship was better. Could I have lessened this heartache if I had taken the hypervigilant/assumed-cheater route? To some extent, but you can see how this approach destroys any hope of a trust-based relationship, even in the case where my girlfriend is trustworthy.
I've chosen an emotionally-charged scenario (love) to illustrate the point; the trust between student and teachers serves a more subtle purpose. And yes, I'm arguing that it's okay to let a few crooks slip through if grabbing them all means implicitly accusing everyone. I just don't buy that you gain a whole lot by going to all this effort to catch plagiarists (they tend to catch themselves eventually). But you do lose something . . . something that's about as hard to put into words as it is important.
I teach university. (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me just chime in here as a university lecturer who has papers turned in to him. I am posting anon, just in case my employer finds out and doesn't agree with me.
I agree that there is a very uncomfortable lack-of-trust issue here, and I would resist ever using such a system to check for plagiarism. When someone hands me something, I don't assume it's plagiarized; I assume that, provided the paper doesn't represent some sudden jump in writing ability or knowledge of the subject, that person wrote it. W
Re:Plagiarism takes yet another hit (Score:5, Insightful)
"guilty until proven innocent" is a bit of a stretch. The instructor is (at first) only checking. Does any act of investigation presume guilt?
There are a great many forms of investigation that we don't allow in criminal cases, for example, unless there is some justification for the suspicion of guilt. For example, you can't just stop random people on the street and search their belongings for illegal items.
I we apply the same logic, here (mind you, teachers aren't law enforcement, so they're not bound by the same rules), then you would ask teachers to refrain from using such tools without a reasonable suspicion of guilt (e.g. a paper doesn't match the voice of its author or a paper is very familiar to the teacher).
I never liked the idea of punishing students for plagiarism, though. I'd much rather that teachers/professors combine approaches to teaching so that plagiarism gains you nothing without the same hard work that everyone else puts in. IMHO, if turning in a paper that someone else wrote can get me a good grade, that's just a sign that the course wasn't actually teaching anything in the first place, but merely hoping that exposure to the material would magically lead to education of the students.
Good teachers rely on a suite of metrics to gauge student progress and adjust the curriculum to suit. Bad teachers "plagiarize" in the sense that they just deliver the material they were given and grade papers/tests on the basis of their comparison to a hypothetical ideal.
Re:Plagiarism takes yet another hit (Score:5, Insightful)
What I meant was "do all acts of investigation assume guilt?" The answer is no. When you get pulled over and the officer runs your license, she isn't implicitly saying "I KNOW you have outstanding warrants!" She is just checking and that isn't a breach of trust. When the instructor runs papers through turnitin, they aren't saying "I KNOW you cheated on this!". He is just checking and that isn't a breach of trust. At least that's how I feel about it.
Re:Plagiarism takes yet another hit (Score:5, Insightful)
That isn't realistic. Teachers teach the same thing for multiple semesters. There's no way to make it so that a paper from one class in one semester is not equally valid in another class in another semester.
Okay, with SOME classes that is possible, but not very many.
Re:Plagiarism takes yet another hit (Score:4, Insightful)
IMHO, if turning in a paper that someone else wrote can get me a good grade, that's just a sign that the course wasn't actually teaching anything in the first place, but merely hoping that exposure to the material would magically lead to education of the students.
Good teachers rely on a suite of metrics to gauge student progress and adjust the curriculum to suit. Bad teachers "plagiarize" in the sense that they just deliver the material they were given and grade papers/tests on the basis of their comparison to a hypothetical ideal.
That is some of the purest, most complete bullshit that I've read in a good long time.
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"guilty until proven innocent" is a bit of a stretch. The instructor is (at first) only checking. Does any act of investigation presume guilt?
Depends on your definition of investigation.
Checking a person's background does not presume guilt - it is why "we" keep records about people in the first place.
(One might argue about pervasiveness of recording keeping, but that is a separate and distinct issue.)
Blanket drug testing, on the other hand, is a presumption of guilt because there is no reason for suspicion but you must actively disprove that suspicion by submitting to a test.
Similarly, I believe that turnitin's testing is also a presumption of gu
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Because it's apparently just as easy(or easier) to require all assignments to be handed in through turnitin rather than having to submit the suspicious ones.
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Re:Plagiarism takes yet another hit (Score:4, Insightful)
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Are students able to take their work down if they want to? Can they do so with a DMCA notice? (I'm not sure if that would be applicable since students have to personally submit their own work, often under coercion) I also checked the turnitin student manual... it goes into detail about how to submit work, but nothing about taking it down. Another problem is that turnitin is abl
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"Back when I was a student, I saw the use of turnitin as a major lack of respect towards me, and I refused to submit my work to it on principle."
Of course it indicates a major lack of respect to do that without permission. That's why I'd make my intention clear on the course syllabus, and ask the student to sign for permission. It doesn't really matter if it is something fancy like turnitin or simply a file cabinet full of photocopies of old papers or a disk full of text files and grep. If the student do
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I've ran into this issue in all of my ENGL / LCC /
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> The real issue is that if Turnitin can make a profit of of other people's work under fair use, then that basically means that students have no IP right [...]
I disagree. TurnItIns work derived of the students is not identifiable as the students work itself. Not even remotely, as the work TurnItIn provides is a totally different one than the student did.
And no, it doesn't mean that they don't have IP rights, the students have the same IP rights everyone else has on a published work. Which means not all e
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
You didn't get screwed by Turnitin. Turnitin simply flagged a similarity. You got screwed by your prof, whose job it is to make an actual decision.
Easy solution - attach an EULA to your paper. (Score:2)
I'm only half kidding here - we need a shrink-wrap EULA for student papers that prevent this use of our intellectual property. In university they might have better standing to say "agree to it or get out", but in public schools I'm sure you could find a way to restrict use of your papers for the "originally intended purpose only" - i.e. grading me.
MadCow.
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There's an old saying, "I love this fucking university, and this university loves fucking me."
Re:Plagiarism takes yet another hit (Score:5, Insightful)
It also seems quite ironic that they have a fair use right to the full work for the goal in enforcing that no one else can reuse even the smallest snippet.
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Google != Turnitin (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a significant difference in what Google was doing with books, where its stated purpose was to provide excerpts (chapters usually) of the book itself.
Turnitin allows automated computerized determination of direct plagiarism, without providing the content to other people.
In the final confrontation with the alleged plagiarist the teacher would probably have to have the original work in hand, but for the analysis portion no human need see either the new or the old work.
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Re:Google != Turnitin (Score:4, Insightful)
In the final confrontation with the alleged plagiarist the teacher would probably have to have the original work in hand
Then what is the purpose of Turnitin? If the teacher cannot obtain a copy of the original without the original author's permission, then how can they make an accusation? Will Turnitin charge for a copy of the original? Will they only distribute the original with the author's consent?
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I didn't say the teacher couldn't obtain a copy. That's your own straw man.
From Turnitin website:
"Our system doesnâ(TM)t deliver guilty verdicts for students. Instead, it generates Originality Reports that provide extensive documentation of any text matches from our databases. Trained faculty then make the determination if plagiarism has occurred."
http://www.turnitin.com/static/pdf/datasheet_cycle.pdf [turnitin.com]
So Turnitin could say the paper matched verbatim another given paper or perhaps 75% of another paper,
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So Turnitin could say the paper matched verbatim another given paper or perhaps 75% of another paper, then the instructor could make a decision on that alone and confront the student.
The problem here is that the teacher has no proof, only circumstantial evidence, since Turnitin cannot legally provide a copy of the supposed original. Because of this, a teacher making an accusation would be opening themselves up, and the educational institution they work for, for big time litigation. In the time I spent working for a University, they did not take plagiarism or accusations of it lightly. Accusations of plagiarism were kept confidential while they were thoroughly investigated by the Univ
Re:Google != Turnitin (Score:4, Insightful)
If the student has plagiarized, the student has found the paper somewhere. There's a good chance it's off the Web, so the teacher can Google for some of the phrases. It may be from earlier classes, in which case the teacher may have back papers to search.
The teacher can use the information from TurnItIn to start an investigation. As you point out, accusing without proof is a real bad idea.
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No it is not. Google provides a small snippet of the books it scans (exceot for old books out of copyright). You can imagine some process to extract the full text by combining thousands of snippets, but it's not a trivial task, and much easier for anyone who wanted to to simply borrow the book from a library.
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Its not clear that turnitin provides paper content to the teacher. They only claim to provide an "originality score" based on computerized analysis.
Its not like a school is a court of law where every grade deserves a hearing before a judge and jury with rules of evidence. By enrolling you agree to be graded.
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Where did you see that Turnitin gave the whole work?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Google directly has an effect on my royalty checks. For that, they've injured me, and the effort I went thru to produce ten books. They have yet to pay me for that abuse.
In the case of fair use for term papers and the like; their commercial value is less clear, but in one swoop, the court killed any commercial return for these works. That's a bit onerous.
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Bullshit.
There is no evidence that shows making available online means no one buys your books.
If just being available meant no one would pay, iTunes would have sold over 2 billion songs.
Many case where someone does just start referencing or using someone elses material, the original work sales increase.
The only effect on your royalty check would be an increase.
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Google directly has an effect on my royalty checks.
How did you determine that?
Re:Economic impact (Score:5, Funny)
His royalty checks decreased. Google something something books. IT WAS GOOGLE'S FAULT!
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Google directly has an effect on my royalty checks.
Oh, it was a direct effect? That means, of course, that Google negotiated your royalty checks down with your publisher?
Oh, you meant that there was an INdirect impact via a reduction in sales due, in part, you suspect, to Google making portions of your work available online.
Of course, you haven't done anything even approaching a rigorous study to confirm any of this. You don't even have a control, do you? You just have "I'm not making as much money as I think I should be."
That said, welcome to the nature of
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If history of digital material is any example, then it's "No negative effect".
Re:Economic impact (Score:5, Interesting)
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Not at all. Look at politicians. Nobody goes off the deep end because they use speechwriters.
The question you want, however, is it considered a violation of the school's honor code? And the answer is most likely yes.
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I released many of my school papers under a license that was essentially the creative commons attribution share-alike license, but with the attribution clause negated. You could legally use it, so long as you did NOT attribute it to me. Sadly no one tried to use any of them (that I know of), so I never got to test the intersection of contract/copyright law and school rules.
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No one was talking about the legality of plagiarism. You don't get arrested for plagiarising your term paper, you get permanently expelled from your university system. The fact that you had the authors permission doesn't change that fact, you're still lying to your university.
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this analysis misses the point. If Turnitin wasn't allowed to just copy the works without permission, they would have to pay students for a license. The unlicensed use is in direct economic competition with the potential sale of legitimate licenses. This is exactly the kind of taking that copyright is supposed to prevent.
Economic impact is broader than that. (Score:2)
In the case law, the factor of "economic impact" is almost never limited to direct competition. In fact, quite the opposite. Think of the case involving the 2 Live Crew parody of "Pretty Woman." [wikipedia.org] In that decision, the court noted that the rap parody wouldn't really be competing for the market that the original was going for. However, they also noted that it might compete in the market for authorized rap versions of "Pretty Woman."
That fair use was OK, but the broad economic impact rationale is found all over
Google Case Completely Different (Score:2)
since it could make pretty much the identical arguments on all points
No, it couldn't because Google is directly distributing the works it scans, as opposed to turnitin.com who is selling services based on analysis of the works, and not distributing the work itself.
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Re:Google Case Completely Different (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Not sure this qualifies (Score:2)
I dunno if this qualifies as fair use. It has a severe impact on the potential market for the work being copied :-)
What fair use? It's not even published. (Score:2)
This verdict is basically total nonsense.
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.
The fact that those that don't want their private papers stolen might
be despicable is not relevant.
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Were they stolen, or did the student consent to this by turning the paper in?
No matter what argument you make, that determination would have to be made on a case-by-case basis.
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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.
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Defenses based on copyright shouldn't
even be applicable.
Uh... Beavis started it.
No, really. Read up on the case; it was the plaintiffs (i.e. the students), not the teachers, who first brought up copyright. In fact, the lawsuit hinged on it: the students were trying to keep their work out of anti-plagiarism tools based on copyright defense. I agree that copyright shouldn't have been used in this case, but not for the same reasons you do.
There is a reasonable expectation when you turn in a paper for school that a teacher will take measures to detect plagiarism. Th
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They are not the student's private papers. They were disclosed to someone else (the professor) for evaluation. You're right that they aren't published and they aren't public either, but "evaluation" certainly includes "evaluating the possibility of plagiarism". If turnitin.com were making the content of papers available to others or publishing themselves, that might be an issue, but they aren't.
Worst case (if this case had gone in favor of the student), professors would subsequently insist that in order
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From womeninbusiness.about.com [about.com]:
As of January 1, 1978, under U.S. copyright law, a work is automatically protected by copyright when it is created. Specifically, a work is created when it is "fixed" in a copy or phonorecord for the first time.
And if you don't trust that source, how about copyright.gov [copyright.gov]:
Do I have to register with your office to be protected?
No. In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the mom
Fixation in a tangible medium of expression. (Score:2)
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The students always have the option not to turn in their essays at all. What's that ... they'd fail? Yes, they would.
I get that people want to protect their creative works, but if you're in a college class, you are getting something in return: a passing grade, provided you didn't plagiarize someone else's material. Now, if there are records of colleges publishing student essays and profiting from it directly and without studen
Copyright? Or privacy? (Score:4, Interesting)
I understand and largely agree with the ruling, but isn't there another issue? Do I have any right to have my (quite possibly deeply personal) ideas kept private from this company (TurnItIn)? Do I have an expectation of any level of confidence between my teacher and myself?
Might this lead to another argument in this kind of case?
Re:Copyright? Or privacy? (Score:4, Insightful)
That may be true in some countries, but I haven't found that to be true here (USA), UNLESS you are being paid by the university. It is common for graduate work to be university property, because it is also common for graduates to be paid by the university to do the research.
Undergrads usually don't get paid by the university to do research or to write up other papers, so their classwork still belongs to them.
Apparently the courts have decided that they don't get to control what is done with their own work. Why should they? Its not like the courts like the little people anyway. They don't have big enough checkbooks to matter.
How does it work (Score:2)
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The Difference Is Chutzpah (Score:3, Informative)
Fair use for the Big guys... (Score:5, Insightful)
So the big guys with the big lawyers get fair use, but for the little guy, it's DMCA takedown notices all the way down
Re:Fair use for the Big guys... (Score:4, Insightful)
OTOH, this case can be cited by other people in the same position to argue that such uses are not infringing. At least in the 4th Circuit, this case will be controlling.
Revenue model (Score:2, Interesting)
Case should be against the schools (Score:2, Interesting)
Even if Turnitin.com is not violating copyright, then surely the schools and teachers are violating copyright by sending a complete copy of your work to Turnitin. The school is making and distributing a digital copy of the work which should not fall under fair use.
Now, writing an essay for your class constitutes work for hire, the school doesn't have the right to distribute this work or make copies of it as they necessarily must do in order to use the turnitin service.
time will prove this decision foolhardy. (Score:2)
the first time that their database is used in an improper manner, turnitin will look like incompetent fools. The judge who ruled this decision will look like an even bigger fool.
What if I turn in my paper with a digital signature or license agreement? turnitin will eventually mis-use the work.
Mixed feelings (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, as a fair use proponent I agree with the decision. Though, even if it didn't apply as an "unpublished work", I still don't see this as a problematic use, in that I don't see any reasonable expectation of confidentiality. If there was one, certainly not one that would extend to expecting the professor would not store, or otherwise use his paper in accordance with the needs of the professor and institution to fairly dole out credit (including keeping, or causing others to keep, a copy for purposes of checking for plagerism now and in the future).
This "use" is quite "fair". Now, if the professor was posting the papers online himself for others to read.... or selling compendiums of papers etc.... thats another story. However, this sort of use seems quite reasonable, and unreasonable to put restrictions around beyond basic protection of the privacy of the student involved (oooh... now how does this relate to FERPA? ... which often does, in some part, apply to students (I used to work in University IT) )
What I find worriesome is the technology itself. Essays are often about similar topics. Papers are seldom about really original topics or even originals slants. Overall, amongst the growing number of similar papers out there, I do wonder how long it will be before their false positive rate starts to climb? Will we begin to see students accused of plagerism for nothing more than not thinking of much new to say, and having a writting style similar to some other unoriginal sod with the same paper topic?
Sure, the chances that someone else will write the same paper you did is pretty small, even with lots and lots of papers. However, what about the chances that any two people in a wide database of student papers will write almost the same paper, given the same topic, and same sources. That question worries me far more as I fear that as time goes on, the chances of this happening approaches 1.
-Steve
My experience with Turnitin.com (Score:5, Interesting)
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My sympathies, but I don't really think you can blame Turnitin for that fiasco.
You might as well demand that chalkboard erasers be banned from classrooms because an irate professor once threw one at you.
Disclaimer: I am a college professor.
economic value of the works (Score:2)
wait a sec. Obviously the student's works have economic value- to TurnItIn! If they weren't scraping work from ten thousand high schools, they wouldn't have a database of work to do their comparisons against. The court's fair-use analysis is nonsense. In an honest evaluation, all four factors weigh against the company:
what is plagiarism? (Score:3, Insightful)
The "close imitation of the language and thoughts". If you have possibly hundreds or thousands of sample works on a particular topic it is very likely that duplication will start occur. It may start out at 1% match but as the database grows the matching to existing parts of other items will grow till the point where it will be virtually impossible to actually write something that is considered actually original by a logical computer.
How many ways can you interpret Shakespeare? I know my English had no frig'n clue about Shakespeare but if your interpretation did not closely imitate his language and thoughts you where 100% wrong! Every passing paper was remarkably similar in its verbiage.
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The headline is correct (Score:2, Funny)
The write-up is hopelessly messed up.
The Fourth Circuit actually ruled on the Turntin case.
Turntin is the now bankrupt company that promised to make a killing using a proprietary process for alchemy.
The court ruled that the metallic proceeds could be shared freely with roofers and electroplaters.
The company plans to move forward with plans to transmute metals with real value in future as soon as their cold fusion reactors are up and running.
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The fact that the coldly calculated it doesn't mean they didn't cave; which they did.
To do nothing is one of the greatest evils.
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Yup, sounds like a professor alright.
"Think like this. Don't think for yourself, it's dangerous."