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If they're making money off my paper I want a cut.

They don't make any money by distributing your work. Nor does the quality of your work in any way affect how they make money off of it. I can't know if this is technically a violation of copyright, but -- it doesn't seem like it is against the spirit of copyright. Anymore than the requirement that you give a copy to your professor to grade.

I understand the plight of educators that want to stop plagiarism, but forcing me to irrevocably offer royalty-free licenses for my work to a for-profit company that is then charging the school (which if it is public is being funded by my tax dollars) is just insane any way you slice it.

I could be misunderstanding the situation, but from your own post you are granting no such license -- they are legally allowed to archive these. Copyright applies when you make and distribute a copy of the work, and they aren't (that I know of) doing any such thing.

(Disclaimer: I don't know anything about turnitin, so I'm not defending them in particular -- just responding to the objections of their model raised by OP.)

you are granting no such license

Yeah, that's the dirty trick. Turnitin hides behind the fact that your professors are the ones that force you to use it, and to use Turnitin you have to register and agree to their terms, which includes letting them use and keep your stuff.

So in reality half the battle is trying to persuade you professor to respect your copyright. I don't mind granting my professor a temporary license to evaluate my work, but I don't wish to give him permission to turn around and give a copy to someone else.

In the court case surrounding this issue the judge basically ruled along the lines of "minors in school don't have rights anyway so this is a moot point", but in university this probably a more legally viable issue.

>I don't mind granting my professor a temporary license to evaluate my work

That's a weird thing to say, and I'm not sure you understand when a license is and is not needed.

If you write an essay and hand me a physical copy, I can then do whatever I want with that copy. I can read it, I can shred it, I can put it in a filing cabinet to gather dust for 20 years.[1] I can even give, sell, or lend it to a friend! I can do all this without needing any special license, because I own the copy you have given me.

What copyright prevents is me photocopying, scanning, or even laboriously hand copying it, and then passing those copies to other people. But while you own the IP, I own the physical copy.

With digital works, the rules are a little different -- if you e-mail me a PDF, sending it to someone else would count as creating a copy, and I'd need your license to do so. But the essential fact is I don't need a special license to hold on to a copy of it. And if you give me permission to send it to someone else, once they have it they can hang onto it as well.

[1] Universities will of course have policies on how faculty handle student work, but that's an orthogonal issue to that of copyright.

I'm sure you are familiar with non-disclosure agreements. Those, and many other, possibly implicit, agreements severely limit what you may do with your 'physical copy'. 'Owning' the copy in no way entitles you to do with it whatever you want. Even telling others you own the copy is something that is easy to forbid.

I was taking issue of the OPs use of the word "license." A license grants you additional rights you would not otherwise possess.

If I'm discussing what actions are, by default, allowed -- well, it isn't very useful to tag a clause onto every statement saying "Unless a legal contract/agreement prevents you from doing otherwise."

That's taken as understood, and only worth mentioning if it is a right or freedom you can't sign away.

Edit: note that I wrote this from my Euro-centric point of view. Here universities are heavily subsidied and Ph.D. students are employees of the university.

No such license is needed. With enrollment in an educational facility, you sign over all rights on required course work to said facility. It's not your work, as little as work you do as an employee is your work: your employer owns all rights.

That's not true. In my jurisdiction it is not even possible for a juristic person (i.e. company) to own any copyright whatsoever. Only a physical person can be a copyright owner here. So I do own the copyright of everything I do for my employer and certainly for anything I ever wrote or otherwise created in school.

Then the employee must have granted the employer a complete and exclusive right to use the copyrighted produces. There is not other solution: otherwise you can extort your company by threatening to leave and revoke all their rights to use your work of the past years. Many types of companies are near impossible without exclusive rights to the fruit of their employees' labour.

This is why in for instance The Netherlands, in every contract, an employer will by default demand all the rights related to work you do in your spare time, if it is related to your profession. And this makes complete sense: in the past, there have been problems with people that loved their job, did some work in the evenings for purely job-related stuff, became disgruntled later and successfully sued to the company for infringement.

That's not actually a universal fact. It's not uncommon to have someone publish a work that was initially submitted as an assignment so and there are university's that don't claim the copywrite on the work.

That is true of work done in University research labs, but course work, where you are paying to be there, not so much. Especially in undergrad and masters programs where students are less likely to work for the university.

Oh get real.

The university has the right to ask you to submit your work however they want as a condition to course completion. If you don't want to submit your work to turnitin you don't have to complete the course. Nobody's forcing you to.

If the extent of your objection is that turnitin robs you of potential financial benefit of selling your work, then that's by design: that's exactly what the educational institution wants to do! It doesn't matter that selling your work to a paper mill is legal. It's against the interests of the institution, so they're not going to let you go through their programme and keep that right.

> If the extent of your objection is that turnitin robs you of potential financial benefit of selling your work, then that's by design: that's exactly what the educational institution wants to do!

I know of no university that explicitly prohibits students from selling papers to paper mills (although I haven't checked). Prohibiting students from using papers from paper mills is a different thing entirely.

Seriously? I am 100% certain that selling papers for other students to use would have violated my university honor code. I would be surprised if there are any schools where that isn't the case.

Aiding cheating is against the honor code, however no one is going to say "sell me your paper so I may turn it in for a grade against the code".

Rather they'd say they want your paper so they can see your thoughts. That's fair because they could get the same effect from merely talking to you about your paper.

Or they'd say that its okay to use outside sources (such as your paper) so long as they cite it. This is also true in many cases.

And if they want your paper so they can "see your thoughts" (and pay you for the privilege!?), what's wrong with that paper also being entered into Turn It In? After all, you surely don't think they were lying about their intentions. Because if you suspect they are lying about their intentions, then aren't you aiding cheating?

Because in the future, you may want to sell that same paper to students after you've graduated.

In that case, you're not breaking any honor code although you're aiding others in being dishonorable to their own codes.

Well, actually you are still breaking the honor code even after you're graduated. Though the school would probably have little recourse against you in practice.

At least in my CSE program, you are not allowed to give anyone else the answers in any form. That includes talking about how you solved an assignment and it certainly includes sharing solutions for any purpose.

So then textbook and study guide authors are violating your schools honor code? Just because I took the time to increase the value of my study guide by specializing it for CS101 at UT, doesn't mean that I sold my guide for the express purpose of some idiot getting out of doing the work themselves.

I know I wouldn't risk selling a study guide that had anything in the same ballpark as answers to assignments.

Thanks to a quick google, here's my old student handbook: "Selling academic assignments. No person shall sell or offer for sale to any person enrolled at the University at Buffalo any academic assignment, or any inappropriate assistance in the preparation, research, or writing of any assignment, which the seller knows, or has reason to believe, is intended for submission in fulfillment of any course or academic program requirement."

On paper, universities disallow helping others cheat. In reality, it doesn't seem to be enforced.

If the helper student has already passed the class, the professor can't take disciplinary action against them without making a major case about it. It's easy to simply fail the cheating student or give them a zero on the assignment without making a record.

Additionally, if it is brought to a committee, it'd be much harder to prove.

So although it's officially not allowed, there's not much universities are doing to combat the providers.

I know at least my university does.

eli's comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793351) prompted me to go and explicitly check my university's academic honour code, which does explicitly include language about selling assignments. While I maintain that there's a difference between selling a paper—i.e., your answers to an assignment—and selling the assignment yourself, I also concede that it's a hair-splitting one.

It looks like my understanding of the honour code is therefore definitely false for my university, and, from the evidence, probably for many others. (This is particularly embarrassing because I was part of the group that approved the final version of the code!)

The university has the right to ask you to submit your work however they want as a condition to course completion. If you don't want to submit your work to turnitin you don't have to complete the course. Nobody's forcing you to.

And what about a required course in high school?

Sounds illegal under child labor laws, but IANAL

A thought experiment: in the USA, a minor's assets belong to the parents, right? So, ipso facto, the parent holds the copyright. What if the parent refuses to allow a copy to go to Turnitin?

Further, minors cannot enter into contracts. Would Turnitin's license agreement be a contract, and hence void since one of the parties was a minor?

More information on this unfortunate precedent-setting litigation is available on Turnitin's Wikipedia entry. I was very much dismayed but not entirely surprised by the rulings.

So, when you copy somebody else's work (e.g. a song) for personal enjoyment, it's an outrageous crime; but when you copy a student's essay for profit, it's fair use. You're right, it's not at all surprising.

I couldn't have worded it better myself :)

When has Turnitin ever copied the essay? They just received a copy and stored it, but never made one themselves.

By that logic, me e-mailing you a Lady Gaga MP3 is not copyright infringement.

But I'll bet I could find a gaggle of lawyers willing to take you up on that.

No such thing follows from icebraining's logic.[1]

If you think otherwise, lay out explicitly how you think the two cases are similar.

[1]Err, unless you are Lady Gaga.

You never made a copy of the MP3 yourself — you just received one and stored it. Ditto for people who receive copies from MegaUpload.

Has anyone ever been convicted for just downloading MP3s?

Besides, there's obviously a difference between receiving a random essay from a person who claims to own the rights (that's obviously in their TOS), and asking to download an MP3 of some band. In the latter case, the downloader obviously knows the copy is illegal and it can be argued that (s)he's abetting the infringer.

It's copyright infringement by you, the person who made and sent a copy, not by me who just received it. If you look at the lawsuits, they're all convicted because they uploaded, not because they downloaded.

You can find that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnitin#Controversy

Turnitin has always been a concern of mine; not just the copyright/fair-use conundrum, but the privacy issues too.

I would add:

4. Privacy. Submitting a paper to Turnitin makes the student's work vulnerable to a breach of Turnitin's servers. Data breaches have become so common that it is probably more accurate to say when Turnitin's servers are breached rather than if they are breached, the student's work could be made public contrary to their wishes.

I am grateful that my professors did not use Turnitin. Some at my school did, but I simply didn't take their classes. Had one of my professors announced they were using Turnitin, I would have dropped the class.

If you suspect me of cheating, talk to me. Put me to any test you like. Have me write my papers in front of you and defend them in an in-person interview. I don't care, just don't ask me to give my papers to Turnitin, because I won't. I don't like them, I don't agree with what they're doing, and I don't trust their ability to secure their servers. Further, I find the idea offensive that I need to prove my innocence when there is no evidence to indicate my guilt.