Students Protest Turnitin.com

StupidSexyFlanders writes "The Washington Post ran a story about students protesting their school's use of anti-plagiarism site Turnitin.com, which checks papers they've written against a database of 22 million other papers. From the article: "Members of the new Committee for Students' Rights said they do not cheat or condone cheating. But they object to Turnitin's automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights." Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?"

Re:Well

[CheshireCatCO]

Actually, a lot of cheating comes from paper mills and using old papers (yours or others'), not Wikipedia. (He says, having taught that the college level recently.) So keeping the papers is a very smart thing to do. I think that legally, TurnItIn.com and other such sites are probably OK in doing that as long as the papers are not accessible except by their comparisons to new submissions *and* they take good steps to make sure that the database isn't cracked. In many ways, it's akin to the difference between the Census Bureau publishing aggregate statistics that include you in them (even very personal data, like sex-related information) and actually publishing your census form.

Re:IANAIPL, but...

[Zaxor]

IANAIPL either, but you have a serious error in your post. Copyrights are NOT like patents. If you create an "original work of authorship," it is automatically copyrighted without you having to do a thing, and without any checks against previous copyrights.

Not to say that there isn't case law covering the student-teacher case, but the basic jist is that the students do automatically have copyrights on whatever original papers they write.

Re:IP rights are the least of it

[Garse Janacek]

That depends on what you're going for -- we used a similar system (maybe it was that exact site, can't remember) when I did some grading in college. A 27% match we would have completely ignored -- that's the kind of correlation you can get from all kinds of reasons, depending on the assignment and on what other assignments are out there. We'd only check out matches like 98%, 99%, on which it's almost impossible to get a "false positive"...

Re:We are not Cheaters

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is the text of the petition circulated in our school:

"A PETITION from the students and Concerned Citizens of McLean High School and their associates

TO Principal Paul Wardinski and the Administration of McLean High School.
WE undersigned, believe and hold that that by mandating that original student works be submitted to the archives of the for-profit online anti-plagiarism program "Turnitin.com," the administration subverts and violates the basic rights of student authors.
We hold that the basic rights of student authors are as follows:
1. To expect that any original composition will be considered the authors property and with respect to the guidelines of Fairfax County Public School's Student Rights and Responsibilities Policy.
2. To expect their work will not be used by or submitted for use to any for-profit company or endeavor without the authors' written permission.
3. To expect that any use or their work for Fair-Use reference will be properly cited using MLA format.
4. To expect that a teacher will restrict access to the students' work to themselves their immediate peers, and their direct supervisors except under circumstances in which such restriction of access would be a clear violation of the law or express permission is given by the author to share their work.
5. To expect that the student will not be coerced into waiving these rights.

We hold that the subversion and violation of these basic rights by the administration is inconsistent with the administration's duty to defend the rights of the student body. This duty is stated repeatedly in the Student Rights and Responsibility Handbook which we and all students are expected to acknowledge and adhere to.

We demand that the Administration recognize our basic rights as student authors. We demand that the administration immediately ceases to mandate that students use Turnitin.com or any similar anti-plagiarism program on written assignments. We demand that Turnitin.com shall only be used in singular properly documented anti-plagiarism action in which the accused knows their accuser and is given the chance to declare their innocence. We demand that the Administration returns to and emphasizes methods of plagiarism detection which do not violate the basic rights of the student authors e.g. requirement of comprehensive bibliographies citation of sources, and actual cross-check of all sources and references by instructors.

By presenting this petition, we fo not intend to subvert the authority vested in the Principal and the administration, nor do we intend to advocate any kind of plagiarism or other academic dishonesty. Rather, we intend to address an issue which is of the utmost concern to us as students of the Fairfax County Public Schools and responsible citizens of the United States of America and the Commonwealth of Virginia using a means specifically reserved for those entities.

Sincerely Yours,
The Undersigned"

        -Matthew Boehm

Re:Well

[GizmoToy]

It'll get you pretty far if you choose a good wedding photographer. Many now assign the rights to the photos over to you. The only places we found that retain photo rights anymore were places that show on film or a mixture of film/digital. The all-digital places, it seemed, universally assign the rights to their employer (me). We own all our wedding pictures, and most people who've been married recently, at least, should too.

No they don't

[Tony]

Besides, the school does own the works you do for them, the papers you turn in, etc. I really don't know by what means they do get it though.

Uhm... no.

You write it. It is yours. Schools do not have the right to republish your works until you give them that permission. It could easily be argued that sending your essays and whatnot to turnitin.com, the school is copying your work, and therefore violating copyright law.

I don't know how that argument would fly in court, as I am neither a lawyer nor a pilot.

Re:Well

[shaitand]

"In fact, they have less right to look at these papers than the school janitor (at least he or she could claim they were reading it to make sure it wasn't something that was accidently tossed in the recycling bin)."

Just to nit-pick use does not fall within the realm of copyright. The me, you, the janitor, and Barbara Bush can all read these papers without violating copyright. What we can not do is make copies of the papers.

Re:my school

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never seen a machine strip the creativity out of students faster than the Public School Systems of our country.

If that isn't the perfect one-line summary for everything I've done over the past week, I don't know what is.

A lot of the teachers at my school are great, but the people downtown calling the shots for the district are absolutely braindead. And I compare the average level a student is at in this part of the state to the rest of the state (or the rest of the bloody country) and I want to cry because we're so far behind.

I had one of those straw-that-broke-the-camels-back events, so it looks like I'm pretty much done with this ridiculous school system I have been stuck in for the past two years (I went to a private school before highschool) and I can deal with my own education. I need to meet with someone 'in the know', but I *think* I'm just going to go take the GED exam and pass that, effectively graduating me a year and some odd months early, so then I can take some coursea at the local college to make up for what I missed at the highschool and get on with my life.

But man, are you right...

self-plagarism

[LordEd]

My former college has rules against self-plagarism [okanagan.bc.ca]:

Self-plagiarism is the submission of work that is the same or substantially the same as work prepared or performed by the student for credit in another course (except in instances where the instructor receiving the work has given prior permission). Work includes but is not limited to essays, term papers, projects, and assignments. Although self-plagiarism may not involve the intellectual theft that characterizes plagiarism (as defined in Definition-1 above), it is a form of academic misconduct and is subject to the same disciplinary actions as plagiarism. All Procedures for the Plagiarism Policy as outlined below will apply to this Policy.

The school owns it anyway

[feronti]

Apparently, none of these students have read the IP policy at their school. At least at my University, anything you turn in for a grade becomes the property of the University. By turning it in, you have implicitly waived your intellectual property rights over it anyway. Granted, I don't think that's fair in the first place, but the simple fact is that many of the students don't have any rights to the papers to begin with.

Re:my school

[fitten]

So, you were bored because you sat around and waited to be given tasks by your teachers? Lots of my friends were fairly bored with high school as well but seemed to find plenty of other stuff to be doing that didn't involve sitting in front of a Nintendo. We had computers and taught ourselves how to program and do all sorts of other things. When we took the computer programming classes our high school offered, our teacher *knew* that our group knew more about it than he did so he let us do what we wanted (as long as it wasn't disruptive) and basically made us assistants for the rest of the class. We all persued interested outside of class that weren't given to us by our teachers.

Re:my school

[ZombieWomble]

Actually, it is a percentile

Er... no, it is not. Most tests which make use of the concept of an "IQ score" do so by fitting it to a normal distribution, with a mean of 100, but the standard deviation is quite often different, which can cause the fraction of people (or, in other words, the corresponding percentile) who can obtain a given score to vary by orders of magnitude at the high end.

Re:Well

[stevejobsjr]

You don't have to apply for a copyright. You automatically hold a coppyright on any original work recorded to a physical or digital medium.

Re:gross disrespect

[ari_j]

Ask Socrates if asking students questions is a waste of instructive time.

Re:The school owns it anyway -- NOT!

[whoever57]

At least at my University, anything you turn in for a grade becomes the property of the University.

I don't thik this is possible. Copyright laws have strict requirement over what constitutes a copyright transfer and it requires a specific conveyance of the copyrights. So, an agreement made at the beginning of your studies can't possibly convey something that does not exist, nor can a policy possibly be construed as an instrument of conveyance.

What might be possible is that you grant a license to the university that allows the university to do whatever it likes with your papers, but you still own the copyright.

Check out section 204 of the copuright code [copyright.gov]

Probably the university owns the physical copy of the paper that you turned in, but not the underlying copyrights.

Re:my school

[Cadallin]

Riiiight. So when 500 or more assignments (per semester!) get made for: write a 2-3 page paper, using these sources, on x topic thats been written about to death; none of them are going to be similar? My ass they aren't. This is a point that I think is legimate, especially given the similarities in English education throughout regions, let alone states and counties. I can't even conceive of how the sheer volume of papers written on the same topic can FAIL to produce remarkably similar papers (assuming standard rules of grammar are even remotely followed, and let's face it, even mistakes are fairly standard by regional dialect, as well as those imposed by normal composition techniques, i.e. typing errors.) Given the lack of curricula changes at most institutions I can see how thousands upon thousands of papers of the same length, on the same topic, written by people with fairly similar educational backgrounds are going to be written within a span of just a few years. Even worse you're talking about people who have read the same resources in preparation for writing these papers. If that's not a system designed to produce identical papers, I don't know what is!

It's just like music composition. People with similar music education backgrounds end up producing similar music. That's just how it is. Are you seriously going to argue that the standard educational texts HAVEN'T been mined for every bloody original idea they contain a thousand times over?

Re:Well

[scoove]

after turnitin copies it, hit them with a DMCA violation

I liked the idea, but think there's a problem with who is violating the copyright. I looked through Turnitin's license agreement and related material - it looks like implied student consent attained from the teacher & institution is their argument, and in fact, they assume this consent has been attained in their contract with the institution. If not, they'll turn a legal argument against the teacher and school district. Be prepared to sue your college/school at the same time as Turnitin.

Incidentally, my wife (who's a teacher) said their district has never discussed this consent issue with the faculty. The impression was that Turnitin has "fair use" rights to material and they're the ones who have legal permission, not the district or teacher. What are the chances the district has forgotten to run this by legal and get an opinion that they can violate student copyrights at will "as long as it makes a teacher's job easier"?

What about a solution? The party that is directly benefitting is the teacher, by reducing the difficulty in screening student work for plagiarism. There is an indirect argument that the student benefits by having the quality of their degree protected from those who attain it from intellectual property theft. Turnitin definitely benefits financially.

One approach would be having districts and teachers use an optional release form with students "making it easy for the educator", or require a source attribution summary and copies of reference materials provided which requires more work for all, but provides alternate verification in the case a release is not granted. Students that do work that lacks attribution and isn't released for Turnitin review can then be given a zero. At the same time, Turnitin should be bound by an agreement that limits their use for this specific comparative purpose, and is prohibited from creating any derivative services that use the copyrighted material (e.g. "Profiles in Student Writing: Buy our new reports on student analysis by subject area." There's value in knowing how half a million college students feel about various topics, like abortion, political issues, value issues, etc. Who do you think could develop this ancillary offering?)

Incidentally, I'd love to run some professional journal articles against Turnitin. Wanna bet you might catch a few lazy profs borrowing from graduate papers in their professional submissions?