The problem is the culture that means that everyone has to succeed and anything less than an 'A' is a failure of the school teacher not someone's little darling being a lazy shit who can't apply themselves because their entire life is based on getting anything they want rather than having to work for it. By the time these kids get to college/university many of them have no idea how to bang their head hard against a problem, fail, learn from that and do it again until they succeed. The idea that you might have to struggle for weeks or months with very little success or fake self-esteem boosts is completely alien to them. I suspect half the reason sections of first world societies have so much issue with immigrants is that many immigrants know how to work hard - its embarrassing for many in so called 'first world' countries to be reminded of what personal discipline and commitment look like...

Problem is the vast majority of archaeological finds are intrinsically worthless unless you're an archaeologist, the owner ends up paying for information to advance the careers of the archaeologist (who do you think got these laws written). If they really wanted to get the cultural heritage they (archaeologists or the Government on societies behalf) should pay for cost of obtaining the information and leave the owner with their property rights preserved. If something is valuable and the archaeologist/Government wants to put it in a museum they should pay the real value. If I own the land, it and everything on it is mine, anything else is just vested interests getting greedy and stealing from me... simple laws protect everyone, complex laws benefit the rich and the lawyers.

And for extra fun, then get it to compare with APPL over the same timeframe...

And consequently (particularly for those making movies) the key characters and associated details remain protected, preventing their use by others. This allows particularly devious estates the option of commissioning new stories with the same characters so as to create all new copyrights for the future (remembering that the plots of stories are not as well protected as the elaborate details that bring them to life).

So (apparently) unlike most people posting so far, I'm a faculty member at a university. Here's why we use Turnitin;

1. Something like 10% of all work submitted for assessment at college (university in the rest of the world) contains plagiarism of one form or another (far too many citations to bother listing)

2. The perception that other students are successfully plagiarising is believed to be a risk factor promoting students to plagiarise (along with a sense that the assessment is meaningless, faculty don't know or care about students as people, and poor time management skills)

3. Gathering the evidence to formally address an instance of plagiarism takes anything up to a couple of days vs a minute with Turnitin

4. The system makes it possible to treat everyone equally. The alternative, which I have seen many times, is that the faculty member pre-judges the student and looks harder for plagiarism when the work is 'too good' for the student. This commonly occurs for non-white middle class students, despite the evidence that white middle class successful students plagiarise to a similar extent that non-white, non-English speaking background students do. Sadly, subconscious racism is very much alive in academia

5. Turnitin does not label a piece of work as plagiarism - the faculty member reviewing the report does. Direct copying is only one of a variety of ways that plagiarism occurs. Turnitin is the only practical way I know of that faculty can use to detect plagiarism by citation - where you steal someone else's bibliography.

For those of you bitching about your loss of copyright - (re)read the decision. The judge is very clear that you have lost nothing and are in no risk of losing anything. Consider this case one of the consequences of the right of "Fair Use" - the rest of the world would love to have the same freedom but US Trade representatives are hell-bent on making sure we don't.

Finally, Turnitin does not show the work to other people, other than your instructor without their permission (which most can't give as its not their work). Most matches turn out to be to public sources or to work of students in the same programme. When we get a request from an outside institution we refuse it- and then immediately re-run the Turnitin report for the student in question.

This is great news but we're not out of the woods yet, the Government is going to review the section and rewrite it. One option would be for them to mandate a particular process but otherwise keep the section unchanged. Ongoing advocacy is essential if the Minister of Commerce is to be persuaded of the need to balance commercial interests with the rights of citizens to due process.

This nicely illustrates a subtle trap that copyright law has fallen into. By being a 'bundle of rights' it has encouraged an approach of ever finer division of intellectual works and their uses. An infinite series of new markets to be exploited - that's the legacy of the 'long tail.' I look forward to serving our new 'reading on saturday morning in bed' licence-owning overlords!