On Mar 12 2007, Douglas Eyman wrote:
This is an interesting question in this particular case (interesting to me anyway :) because what you are saying is that the hash itself does not incorporate th students' original expression. The problem that I have with this logic is separating the hash function from the output of the system.
If I put this into turnitin.com:
Perhaps the most obvious theory that hypertext embodies and makes explicit is Julia Kristeva's (1986) notions of intertextuality: Kristeva, influenced by the work of Bakhtin, charts a three-dimensional textual space whose three "coordinates of dialogue" are the writing subject, the addressee (or ideal reader), and exterior texts; she describes this textual space as intersecting planes which have horizontal and vertical axes ...
The result I get is this:
Perhaps the most obvious theory that hypertext embodies and makes explicit is Julia Kristeva's (1986) notions of intertextuality: Kristeva, influenced by the work of Bakhtin, charts a three-dimensional textual space whose three "coordinates of dialogue" are the writing subject, the addressee (or ideal reader), and exterior texts; she describes this textual space as intersecting planes which have horizontal and vertical axes ...
with a notice that all of the text matches. Well, huh, looks like exactly the original expression to me.
First of all, "original expression" is a term of art in copyright. I wasn't talking about the "original expression" in the colloquial sense. I was talking about expression that orginates with an author, i.e., copyrightable expression. But in any event: yes, you get out of Turnitin something identical to what you put in. But that text is not (as far as we know) what is being stored in their database. They are storing an alphanumeric string that looks quite different. Tasini and Matthew Bender appear to say that the ability to re-assemble text into its original format is not relevant to the question of copying. What is relevant is what is actually on the disc or memory device. That result is not entirely compatible with some of the early digital memory cases (like Williams Electronics). But it seems to mean that storing data about a work is not a copy, while storing the actual digitized work is. How you differentiate *storing instructions for making a copy* from *storing a copy*, is, as a matter of machine function, a bit of a mystery to me. But that is a result of a lot of mistakes the courts made in the early 1980s, and there's probably not a whole lot we can do about it now. DLB -- Dan L. Burk Oppenheimer, Wolff & Donnelly Professor University of Minnesota Law School 229 19th Avenue South Minneapolis, MN 55455 ********************************** voice: 612-626-8726 fax: 612-625-2011 bits: burkx006@umn.edu