It occurs to me that requiring a student to agree to Turnitin as a requirement for a course may be a "contract" made under duress and therefore subject to challenge. Refusal to submit to any kind of self disclosure is evidence of nothing. Particularly true in U.S. public institutions. (Constitutionally determined) I would hope that we are teaching people to advocate for themselves. The student that Barry mentions is remarkable on many levels. She must be pretty sure her work is clean. James burkx006@umn.edu wrote: Hi Doug -- First, I agree about the separate issue of instructors managaing relationships with students. As far as the copyright question goes, no fair use configuration is *ever* resolved until litigated. But that doesn't mean that we can't do a good extrapolation from decided cases. And one thing the Supreme Court has been fairly clear on is that the commercial/non-commercial distinction is not determinative, or even very important, in fair use. So that doesn't really count against Turnitin or for Google on the analysis. If there is a difference between Google Books and Turnitin, I would say that it is in the public benefit of the resulting database. The potential public benefits of the Google digitized library are enormous; the public benefits of the Turnitin database are much more modest. DLB On Mar 9 2007, Douglas Eyman wrote:
Dan,
thanks for this cite -- your work on the Google Books issues is really interesting (especially for those of us who are interested in both IP and database issues).
But I'll have to disagree with your disagreement a bit :) -- Google Books' economic model doesn't currently charge users for access to the text (and they restrict it as well), whereas Turnitin.com does charge directly for access to the copyrighted works in its database. I think it is certainly feasible to make a kind of fair use case, but I'm less concerned about that issue than how instructors and institutions manage their relationships with students through the lens of using the system. (And besides, given that there has been no litigation that has resulted in a ruling on whether Turnitin.com's use is indeed fair use, it remains an unresolved (an unresolvable until litigated) question.)
Doug
burkx006@umn.edu wrote:
On Mar 8 2007, Douglas Eyman wrote:
If you put in a substantive amount of the "plagiarized text," the hash that is stored is output as identical to the original work that has been collected by the company. In other words, if you took all of a book that someone else has written and put it into a database, if when you get the output it reads the same, then the IP issues are still the same
I'm afraid I tend to disagree -- that is not what the cases say (specifically, see here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=949937&high=%20Mereology )
What you have described is essentially the Google Book Search project. The strongest argument for Turnitin as "fair use" is the one that Google has asserted.
DLB
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