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Comment by shaggyfrog | Hacker News Reader

While I sympathize with the instructor and think he should be incentivized to fight cheating, I'm not pleased with the use of services like TurnItIn. Basically, the student gives someone some faceless company a license to whatever they create for perpetuity. Are these companies ever compelled to delete material on request? And who could audit that?

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I completely agree with this sentiment. It is difficult for me to express how extremely inappropriate I think it is for a school to transfer ownership of a student's assignment to a third party who uses it strictly for profit. It would already be iffy if turnitin was a nonprofit, but they aren't.

Papers that students legitimately write and no third party ever gains access to, are still inflating their essay counts and therefore making some guy rich.

The courts upheld that it isn't a copyright violation since they decided it was fair use, but I have to say even if it is legal it is morally abhorrent for schools to go along with it. Plagiarism is unavoidable from individuals that are trying to scam their way through school, and something that needs to be combated, but universities are supposed to be bastions of enlightenment not cronies for privately held corporations.

To be clear, I don't see any problem with automatic plagiarism detection. I do see a problem with very significant profits being made due to usage of students work that they cannot possibly opt out of (especially high school students who don't even have the option of transferring schools if they don't want their work being used that way)

You already have a copyright just by writing it. Courts have ruled this is fair use, which means the courts feel this use of content is more valuable to society than writers keeping their rights.

I wonder if laws would change if we were talking about combatting plagiarism in film schools by keeping a database of all films to match against.

If it's fair use, the student keeps copyright, they just can't go after Turnitin etc. for copyright infringement. Lack of infringement != losing copyright. If the professor were to, say, publish an anthology of student papers, this would not be fair use and he'd have to either get permission or risk being sued by the students.

There're various other cases of fair use that make this fairly obvious, eg. when you DVR a TV show, that's fair use, but it doesn't mean that the MPAA has lost copyright over that show and can no longer go after people who share it on Bittorrent.

Yeah, my comment was unclear. I didn't mean to imply the students lost their rights, just that the courts have decided this particular use supersedes their rights under the fair use doctrine.

I am the professor who wrote the blog post.

What you mention was a very big problem for the adoption of services like Turnitin. In fact, when there is a match, there is no way of seeing the "source" of the homework, unless you get a permission from the "owner" of the homework.

Also, students when they submit the assignment to Turnitin, they assign a license to index the content for plagiarism detection purposes, and for nothing else.

And students have the right to remove their assignments from the index, if I understand the language of the agreement correctly.

students when they submit the assignment to Turnitin, they assign a license to index the content for plagiarism detection purposes, and for nothing else.

I thought you said it was integrated into Blackboard, thus not requiring students to directly submit their assignments to Turnitin?

A fellow grad student got blackballed and ultimately kicked out of the program for bringing this up to the chair of the department.

There are many ways for which most of the same benefit can be gotten, such as having the software be paid for by each school, which would host it itself and maintain its own database. Crawling from the web would still be feasible (just with a lot of duplication of effort between universities), and you would still be able to catch students at the same school who copy from each other---and most of the students who copy from others are going to copy from students who attend the same institution.

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