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Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

OK, this objection sort of makes sense to me. Do they have something in their Ts and Cs which says "by submitting your work you consent to us storing your work..."? Presumably people who submit their work to them also benefit to some extent though, because then plagiarisers of your work will be caught?

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>When a paper is submitted to Turnitin, it is compared against a vast, secure proprietary database of licensed source material, including millions of periodicals, academic journals, books, and web pages. Turnitin also maintains a separate repository of student papers. Each institution (at the discretion of his or her school administrator) can determine whether or not to include student papers in the repository. We can remove student papers from the standard repository at the request of a school administrator.

https://help.turnitin.com/Privacy_and_Security/Privacy_and_S...

So your school or university are really deciding whether your paper is stored for future plagiarism checks.

Defaults to on. I'd hope it's explained clearly and the institution is forced to choose on or off during signup, not buried somewhere in the settings.

Often you don't really have a choice, if you're enrolled in a school. Tough luck you get to give up your rights.

You don’t have a choice if your grader/professor keeps a copy either.

Most people are probably less concerned about their prof running a business off a desk drawer of old papers.

But technically, you have recourse if your professor distributes the paper.

In practice, this could easily fall under fair-use, though, since the paper isn't distributed for the purpose of consumption.

Just because something is commonly practiced without choice, doesn't mean that it is legally defensible, which is what the person above was questioning.

Authors generally have right to their works by default, even students. Those who use copyrighted works for academic purposes do get some exceptions to copyright law.... but a commercial service is not this.

Furthermore, student assignments are additionally protected by FERPA.

I'm not sure the answer, but I do think it's a great question.

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