Comment by woofcat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by woofcat | Hacker News Reader

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So by that logic I can pirate all content, and as long as I don't claim it's mine it's not violating copyright laws?

U.S. copyright law provides copyright owners with the following exclusive rights:

- Reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords.

- Prepare derivative works based upon the work.

- Distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership or by rental, lease, or lending.

- Perform the work publicly if it is a literary, musical, dramatic, or choreographic work; a pantomime; or a motion picture or other audiovisual work.

- Display the work publicly if it is a literary, musical, dramatic, or choreographic work; a pantomime; or a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work.

-Perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission if the work is a sound recording.

Copyright also provides the owner of copyright the right to authorize others to exercise these exclusive rights, subject to certain statutory limitations.

Fair use is an affirmative defense to copyright violation. In this case, fair use _probably_ applies. First, it's a transformative use, albeit not a typical one. Secondly, TurnItIn's service does not diminish the market for the original work. Institutions pay TurnItIn to detect plagiarism, not to read content of websites it scrapes. Arguably, maybe this reduces the demand from university libraries to buy the works, but since there's still value to have the documents in the library for student access, I'd want some convincing evidence that this is actually happening.

Combined, TurnItIn is offering a service that individual copyright holders are likely uninterested in providing themselves, the use does not reduce the marketability of the copyrighted work, and there is probably not a market for this service that individual copyright holders could monetize. This is a pretty good case for fair use.

Not trying to stir something, genuinely trying to find the line/difference, so this may be a dumb question, but:

By that logic, isn't it the same for Google? They keep a copy of your content in their cache/index (you can even get the indexed page directly from their cache).

If I'm not entirely mistaken, online copyright enforcement has focused on sharing/sending/transmitting unlicensed copyrighted work. It has not enforced downloading against the downloader.

So, sure - download to your heart's content. Which means TurnItIn has little incentive to keep works out of their database - you can't make a claim against them if they don't publicize that your work is in it.

>anyfoo

You can opt out of that, also it's published content and caching has a carved out exception. When you use this service at a school the teacher submits your paper to the service and they store it to validate against other students papers as well.

They don't only check against "published" sources.

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