

Court decides "fair use": Turnitin.com not violating student copyright - dxjones
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/04/fair-use-bolste.html

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cduan
I'm actually kind of torn over the result in this case. On the one hand, it's
great that the court adopted an expansive view of fair use. In particular, I'm
glad that the court strongly approved Pierre Leval's transformativeness test,
which is a great standard for internet services that use copyrighted works in
innovative ways.

On the other hand, you have to admit that it's weird for the students, who are
forced to submit their personal works to this third-party service.

Consider an analogy: your startup got a great valuation from a VC, you're
signing the papers, and suddenly the lead partner says to you, "Oh, one more
thing. You have to submit copies of all of your software to Microsoft for
archive purposes. But don't worry, they promised not to do anything with it!"

Sure, Microsoft will probably just leave your source code on an archive disk
and never look at it. But still, it's a weird feeling.

~~~
tokenadult
_students, who are forced to submit their personal works to this third-party
service_

The value the students gain from this service is authentication that their
school papers are their own work, which makes their school credentials more
valuable. It is a good trade-off for the students, who lose no rights at all
to produce further derivative works from their original works.

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nopassrecover
Google should use this as a precedent for storing the works of books in a
database for search purposes.

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JacobAldridge
Google wouldn't be that crazy, surely. Imagine the copyright outrage, the
legal fees, and the obvious need to track down authors all over the world.

Why such a fantasy would cost them $125M at least!

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Ardit20
that is nothing compared to what they could gain

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tokenadult
Interesting commentary on cultural differences regarding plagiarism in
academic papers:

<http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/2009-04-15-voa1.cfm>

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nopassrecover
Do you think this is a cultural difference or an educational difference? Many
students may not see what is wrong with representing the thoughts of others
until it is explained to them (something that occurs typically at a high
school level in Australia).

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tokenadult
Cool! I always thought that the copyright claims against Turnitin.com were a
classic example of a "strike suit," a bogus legal claim to shake down a
defendant for a monetary settlement.

~~~
nopassrecover
Maybe, but the claim isn't that bogus - the students haven't given
Turnitin.com rights to use their work especially for monetary gain.

~~~
tokenadult
I heard a lot from one of the students when he was first publicizing his
lawsuit on another Web forum. His dad was a lawyer, and it was painfully
apparent that they were constructing outlandish hypothetical harms to students
in an online statement they wrote about why what Turnitin.com does was so
evil, in their opinion. He finally shirked away from the online discussion on
that forum after getting lots of counterargument from fully grown and very
experienced lawyers who poked holes in his claims. I see the court system on
both the trial level and appellate level have done the same. My impression at
that time, and my impression today, is that the case was made up in an attempt
to make some easy money--just the sort of lawyer behavior that should be
decried by hackers everywhere.

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nopassrecover
Maybe but to me this seems like an ad hominem argument - just because he did
it for money doesn't mean there isn't some value in his argument. As I
mentioned in another comment, if we substitute student work for music tracks
then this wouldn't even be an argument. This ruling is saying it is within my
fair use rights to profit from dealing with copyrighted media abstractly, so
long as I don't distribute the media itself.

What I haven't seen mentioned is that when there is a match on plagiarism then
the teachers _do_ get access to the plagiarised document - so they are
profiting from using _and_ distributing copyrighted material they have no
rights to.

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seiji
Turnitin is generally evil. They don't just keep the work of students without
the student's permission, but they crawl sites for any potential school work
they don't already have: <http://turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html>

~~~
tokenadult
That sounds approximately as generally evil as Google, Yahoo, and any other
Web search service that crawls sites.

