Comment by Zev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zev | Hacker News Reader

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Just to get this out of the way: I would rather fail a class than cheat. We don't know each other, so you might not believe me. But, thats my personal belief.

This dislike isn't arbitrary. My problem is that I wrote the paper. I don't want a third party to be able to use it to their own monetary gain without my permission. Being forced to do so left a bad taste in my mouth. When I tried to get in touch with TurnItIn to express my concerns, I didn't receive any response.

I can see the counterargument in your head already -- "But you use Google, don't you? How about Amazon and hundreds of other services that keep information about you." To which, I respond that I'm not signed into Google (prefer Bing or Duck Duck Go, at that) do not use Facebook and find Amazon's recommendations useful enough that it doesn't bother me. And I chose to use the rest of the services.

These companies also make their privacy policy and what they do with the information clear. With TurnItIn, the privacy issue wasn't clear when I looked. Would they ever sell the database? If they did, would they make a reasonable effort to protect my information? I was turning in a paper with my name and email address on it, after all. Tied directly to my college information, at that.

"I don't want a third party to be able to use it to their own monetary gain without my permission."

While I can appreciate the sentiment, that's not the law. I think Fair Use must apply when we're the content providers, just as much as when its Viacom.

With that said, your approach is probably the right one for you: avoid classes/teachers that use it. Personally, I don't mind, although anyone who would actually copy one of my papers has bigger academic problems than plagiarism.

My (non-lawyer) understanding is that fair use doesn't apply because this is a for-profit situations.

That's not true. Wikipedia lists this under "Common Misunderstandings" of Fair Use: "If you're selling for profit, it's not fair use. While commercial copying for profit work may make it harder to qualify as fair use, it does not make it impossible. For instance, in the 2 Live Crew Oh, Pretty Woman case, it was ruled that commercial parody can be fair use."

Companies like Kinko's also operate under Fair Use (when you're making a copy of a page from a book).

Keeping an exact and full copy of my work without any modifications pretty much rules out the possibility of a parody. And TurnItIn isn't doing any sort of creative work with it (musical or otherwise).

Unless you're saying my work is a parody of itself? In which case, its still my work. And they're still not doing any creative work with it. An algorithm can be creative, but applying it over and over is not.

Federal Appeals Court Judges, who know US law pretty well, disagree with your assessment of US law: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/headline-her...

And it was unanimous.

Like I said: Not a lawyer.

First, TurnItIn required students to enter into a "binding agreement" when they uploaded papers to the site.

Being forced to agree to the terms doesn't make them okay. It just means that I didn't want to fail and didn't have any other choice.

Second, TurnItIn's use was "fair" according to the four factors found in US copyright law, with most weight being given to the "transformative" nature of what TurnItIn was doing with the papers.

I wonder if any weight could be given to the argument that in order to be checked, the paper is implicitly given a second use, to verify plagiarism -- not that the checking process itself is transformative itself. And if that is true, would the only reason it is okay is due to the first reason? But, like I said, not a lawyer. And not about to find one to appeal this case.

You should read the actual ruling if you want details, but the two issues you mention are unrelated.

Here's what the actual ruling said on the second issue: "Second, the court determined that iParadigms’ use of each of the plaintiffs’ written submissions qualified as a "fair use" under 17 U.S.C. § 107 and, therefore, did not constitute infringement. In particular, the court found that the use was transformative because its purpose was to prevent plagiarism by comparative use, and that iParadigms’ use of the student works did not impair the market value for high school term papers and other such works".

And it goes into detail about how their use satisfies the standard pillars of fair use.

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