I am familiar with several universities that use turn_it_in_dot.com

They (faculty in the departments) have chosen to set the service up such that when an assignment is required, students submit to this service. The student can check their submission before finalization; if the service flags content as problematic the student has the choice to submit anyway, or revise and try again later.

Faculty have the option to enable a feature such that they *could* see that a students initial submissions had problem content, but that feature isn't enabled for the instructor at this time. Apparently this is a choice available to course instructors as they set the service configuration for their course. This deployment makes the mentioned pay-to-check-the-paper student-side service moot.

While I believe students do release their copyright to the work as part of this- I can't take seriously the idea anyone cares about the copyright on their intro biology lab report, if they were planning to copyright it I suspect a different type of skullduggery.

It is a muddier situation for non-entry level classes, but I don't know of any 3rd or 4th year courses that do use this type of service at the universities I have some familiarity with. Especially these days, when even at prestigious universities most college freshman can't generate written content that earlier was required for good marks at high school graduation-- I don't feel students in the early university courses are giving up much by checking that check-box re copyright.

That's just wrong. Even radio stations (usually) got that right. I won't listen to my ipod-imported version of those albums as the jump from one mp3 to another is also just wrong for them. I ended up merging the mp3 in Audacity and building my own album. Jarringly wrong.

I see this as one more planted article in mainstream press: "Science is there to mislead you, listen to fake news instead". The rising tide against education and critical thinking in the USA is reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution in China. It is even more ironic that the argument "against" metrics that usefully determine validity is couched in a pseudo-analytical format itself. At this point in the USA, most folks reading (even) the New yorker have no idea what a p-value is, why these things matter, and they will just recall the headline "science is wrong". And then they wonder in Detroit why they can't make $100k a year anymore pushing the button on robot that was designed overseas by someone else- you know, overseas where engineering, science, etc are still held in high regard.

here in the MidWest, EECS grads are working in cable TV call centers.