I don't believe there are any legal cases that have been decided about turnitin.com, but there have been successful student challenges to its implementation --primarily in Canada, see for example: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20060309/plagiarism_tool... http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2004/01/16/mcgill_turnitin030116.html As Alexis notes, there are pretty strong claims on both sides. For a good example of both, see Charlie Lowe's argument against its use http://cyberdash.com/plagiarism-detection-software-issues-gvsu and Turnitin.com's response http://kairosnews.org/turnitins-response-to-recent-posts-discu I've done several workshops for writing teachers that address the issue of plagiarism, and even though there isn't a clear legal finding that turnitin.com violates students' intellectual property rights, I think that making the case on that basis is a bit of a red herring -- turnitin.com (and other plagiarism detection services) can be a good tool for teaching about plagiarism, but it's not a good tool for stopping it. What *is* a good tool for stopping plagiarism is designing better assignments, getting students invested in their work, and treating plagiarism as a pedagogical problem rather than a moral one. And one further note (which prompted my reply): Alexis Turner wrote:
A few other notes to consider: Turnitin does not store the actual paper. They store a hash of the paper, weakening the argument that IP is being violated.
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 (that is, the IP violation argument is certainly not weakened unless the output of the comparison itself is never displayed). I tend to think that students who object to a guilty-until-proven innocent use of systems like turnitin.com should certainly be allowed to question the ethics of instituting such a system. I believe there is also an option to check the paper but prevent it from being added to the database (I know this is true of mydropbox.com and fairly sure that is also in turnitin.com) -- this allows students to check their own work in an ethically responsible way; if the instructor can establish a pedagogically responsible use of the tool (by utilizing this feature and by using it as a learning tool rather than a detection service), then both students and teachers would be well served by it. Douglas Eyman Sr. Editor Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/