March 26, 2008
Academic Reaction to Court Decision About Plagiarism Detection Is Mixed
Education bloggers disagree over a federal judge’s decision holding that a commercial plagiarism-detection tool popular among professors does not violate the copyright of students, even though it stores digital copies of their essays in the database that the company uses to check works for academic dishonesty. (See a free Chronicle article posted today.)
Georgia Harper, a copyright expert who is the scholarly-communications adviser for the University of Texas at Austin libraries, called the ruling a “relief” to many high-school and college administrators. The plagiarism-detection tool at issue in the case, Turnitin, is used at thousands of colleges and schools around the world.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia, said he is “much less comfortable” with the ruling. “I object to the whole techno-fundamentalist process and mistrustful culture of ‘Turnitin,’” he wrote. “It undermines the relationship between student and professor and among students. There has to be a better way.”
Eric Goldman, an assistant professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, wrote on his blog that he is most troubled by the fact that in some cases students might be forced to use Turnitin. “This isn’t the biggest travesty in the world, but I’m not sure it’s fair either,” he said.
“This is a ruling of potentially large significance,” he added.
What do you think? —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Wednesday March 26, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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The judge is wrong. You should not be able to use the work of someone else to make money without their permission.
Consider a different case. What if a Microsoft employee sent a copy of the source code for Excel to a friend. That friend would then serve as a consultant to programmers wanting to work with Excel.
Would that be illegal? Would it be a violation of Microsoft’s copyright?
This consultant would be making money off the effort of Microsoft. Microsoft has a legal right to control what happens to the code.
Not all students give permission to use their papers, nor are they all in a position to enter such an agreement voluntarily. The students write the papers, so they own them, case closed.
— me Mar 26, 10:21 AM #
Problem is, some students (about 10%, in my experience) don’t write their papers, or at least pieces of them. It’s unfortunate that their dishonesty makes it necessary to use sources like Turnitin, but that’s the way it goes.
— Scott Mar 26, 11:34 AM #
Students do not hold copyrights on papers. Until they do, they cannot claim copyright protection. Duh. And what about recyclers? Should they be able to profit from someone’s blue book tossed in the trash? Especially if it was an A paper?
— marci Mar 26, 12:17 PM #
marci, I’m not sure where you got your law degree, but you must have been absent the day copyright was discussed.
— Devon Mar 26, 12:43 PM #
I believe the entire scope of the Turnitin argument is a philosophical question and it always has been so. When the point is reached where enough content is uploaded to enough servers, everything written – including so-called original work – will have a high probability of being identified as not original.
If you doubt this logic, consider the furor over Google Scholar and any number of similar ‘scan everything’ initiatives. When is a work protected, marginally protected, or completely protected? Today I would suggest that nothing is completely protected. Just because a technology application makes a procedure feasible does not mean it is a useful undertaking.
We should not be using the lowest common denominator – students from grade school forward should understand and apply truthfulness and know what the word ‘integrity’ means. To use technology to correct for behaviors is a foolish enterprise (like placing cameras at intersections to identify cars but not drivers with the implicit and false assumption that the owner is the driver).
From a business perspective, Turnitin should not assume their lowest common denominator is zero, as it will not work – there will always be the truthful few who will be charged for a crime they did not commit.
Personally, I see Turnitin as a mis-applied tool to a social problem that needs a solution through human-based strategies and not by technology.
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you are Turnitin, everything looks like plagiarism.
By the way, try out the ‘reverse citation’ capability in the Turnitin product. Instead of creating a bibliography first, go right ahead and write anything factual – and then get your bibliography as an outcome. I wonder how many of us would be able to teach today if we had earned our college degrees and credentials by such technological methods of web-based inquiry and applied critical thinking by writing and then investigating?
This is research? I think not.
— Steve Mar 26, 12:49 PM #
The idea that students have any choice in giving permission to have their writings TurnedIn is silly. If the course is required for graduation, they have no choice. Oh, I suppose they can choose not to graduate or they can choose to go to another less panopticonal school. But only a cynic would call this choice. And Marci, you’re inaccurate. See the following, from the US copyright office:
“When is my work protected? Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.“Do I have to register with your office to be protected?
No. In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. You will have to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work. See Circular 1, Copyright Basics, section “Copyright Registration.” “
from www.copyright.gov
in the faqs.
— Doug Mar 26, 05:58 PM #
To steve above:
I am a proff, and I use a plagiarism service. I do not blindly accuse students of plagiarism whose writing matches someone else’s superficially. I actually check the links and sources to see that they are truly plagiarized. These services are just tools that make it easier to find the sources of plagiarism.
To those who think that these services violate the trust between students and teachers, you may have a point for some teachers, but not in my case. I have been able to tell if something had been plagiarized before the services like Turnitin were used, but now it is just easier for me to prove it.
Even when I assign students original specific paper topics, a few still choose to plagiarize. Many do not even know that cutting and pasting from a slew of websites is plagiarism. I use these services to help students to understand what is plagiarism, so that they can succeed in the future.
It does not violate a student’s privacy in the same way that a camera on the street does. The student’s are turning in their papers to me to read them, not submitting a daily log of what they are doing in their life.
This technology does not give the teacher an excuse to dehumanize themselves, the decisions are still human decisions. Electronic plagiarism tools are just that, tools. They do not replace my thinking process as Steve suggests.
— russell Mar 26, 06:46 PM #
I love Turnitin. It makes my students better writers and relieves at least one major concern as I try to assign more meaningful writing assignments to some 300 students each semester.
I agree with russell in that I have found it to be a great educational tool for my students. I am amazed at how many of them (especially the seniors) are clueless about plagiarism.
— Alan Mar 26, 08:44 PM #
Russell, Alan and others who like services such as Turnitin for scholarship reasons make reasonable points about why that’s so. Likewise, the issue of student/teacher trust is arguable for each person and each relationship.
Nonetheless, this is about neither of these notions or anything else except copyright. In this instance, the 4th Circuit court (as Professor Harper at UT points out, along wiith the 9th and 2nd in other decisions) has ruled that the “speculative harms to copyright owners” compares unfavorably with “the enormous public benefit of transformative uses”.
What that means in English is that some days, though the copyright owners have rights, the greater public good is served by exceptions to those rights.
— Rob Mar 27, 08:00 AM #
It seems to have occurred to no one that the copyright issue is precisely irrelevant if the material has been plagiarized. As Doug pointed out, “Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form . . .”
A close reading reveals that this does not say that the material you rip off from someone else becomes your own property and thus protected by copyright, from the moment you cut and paste it. If I break into your garage and steal your car, it does not thereby become my property. Nor does copyright law protect the thief. It does, or at least is supposed to, protect the rights of the writer against thieves.
— Dan Kirklin Mar 27, 08:44 AM #
Dan…You’re only right regarding the work of those people who have actually plagarized. To assume that that’s anything approaching a majority is to exhibit a level of cynicism that makes me wonder how you get through an ordinary day.
— Rob Mar 27, 08:48 AM #
WHO IS THE CREATOR?
By the way, we haven’t discussed who the original owner of the paper is: is it the student (the one who did the writing) or the class (the agent who determined the assignment)? These papers are not something that students are writing on their own, and, if the class or the university is the owner, then that class or university has the ownership rights to submit the paper to a plagiarism detection service if it wishes. If it’s the student, then that’s another story, but we need to pin this down first.
— Jeff Mar 27, 10:24 AM #
Let’s not forget that Turnitin provides the copyright holder with some degree of protection from thieves (plagiarists). It’s not in the business of selling any of the material it compares documents to, nor does it give anyone open access to the accumulated material. Assuming the purpose of copyright is to protect an author from others selling or claiming his or her work as their own, then I think the judge’s call is correct. It’s nitpicking to use a copyright argument against Turnitin’s practice. Some of the arguments people are making would put libraries and book resellers in jeopardy.
— CW Mar 27, 10:32 AM #
Dan has a wonderful idea that could lead to a quick solution. Let’s take any stack of student essays and divide them into plagiarized and non-plagiarized. The former have no copyright protection, so send them to Turnitin. The latter are protected under a U.S. law that vests copyright in the author. These cannot be sent to Turnitin.
Or they couldn’t under U.S. law until Judge Claude Hilton ruled Turnitin’s use of other people’s property “transformative.” Why didn’t Judge Hilton come up with the solution described here instead of stretching the law? Perhaps because he hadn’t read these posts.
— Vivian Mar 27, 10:32 AM #
Jeff…Nobody has thusfar suggested that the university being the motivator does therefore give it some ownership in copyright. That’s because unless there is a specific work-for-hire agreement. the university has no claim to ownership of things created in the classroom.
P.S. As to a work-for-hire, remember that it is after all the STUDENT who has “hired” the university to provide the education and not the other way round.
— Rob Mar 27, 10:45 AM #
Why don’t I read about universities requiring faculty staff or administrators to run their papers or books through turnitin before publication? Plagiarism by one of us is more damaging and embarrassing than plagiarism by a student.
— why just students Mar 27, 11:41 AM #
Rob, I deal with authors all day. That may or may not make me cynical, but it does remove some illusions. (Ambrose Bierce defined “cynic” as “ancient Greek philosophers suffering from a defect of vision that caused them to see things as they are rather than as they should be.”)
Be that as it may, checking essays, etc., for plagiarism is no more a violation of copyright than grading tests is. The next logical step would be for students to insist on being paid before their compositions can be read at all. Nuts.
— Dan Kirklin Mar 27, 03:41 PM #
Bypassing the copyright issues for the moment (I know, I know, that’s the point of the story…), plagiarism detection and prevention services like Turnitin can be used to foster very productive teacher-student dialogs about plagiarism and the scholarly writing process. For my teaching center’s podcast, I interviewed a chemistry instructor who does just that, and in the interview she makes some great points about the conditions for using these kinds of service that foster trust and collaboration among students and faculty.
— Derek Mar 29, 01:37 AM #
I respond here to Number 7 above. Your position I respect – clearly you see the tool as beneficial both for students and for you. That’s wonderful. For me the implicit statement made by every new technology purveyor is: This is technology – it is good for you.
Students need to be educated about what plagiarism is, but at a much earlier age than HS or college. Cheating is still a social problem. I knew students who would in grade school rip off Encyclopedia Brittanica or National Geographic – because it was the best technology of the time. If they could have looked up – ‘paper on geography United States’ – on the Internet, I am quite confident they would have done so. Meanwhile, other student’s were crafting their own works from sources such as EB or NG, and their teachers knew this because they wrote papers like a ten-year old.
Therefore, when your 25 year-old student begins submitting papers written like a brilliant scholar or quotes Stephen Jay Gould without citing SJG, this is typically quite a turn from their typical ’10 year old’s writing’ style.
Turnitin is a great investigative tool. I agree it has merit. I am much more concerned with the legacy of files created and archived by Turnitin for future applications and, yes, adjudications, then I am about how well it assists teachers in couching their students in how not to be plagiarists by accident rather than by intent.
The problem with companies is when they go out of business, their records and archives – particularly if these are their assets – are subject to sale and re-use in new and inventive ways.
Hey, let’s have Microsoft buy Turnitin someday and combine all those writings about places depicted in MS’s wholly owned Bettman Archives. Then the photographic record will be as complete as any writing that’s ever been committed to disk, and totally accurate or totally inaccurate, depending on how interpreted.
Copyright law is a silly way to try to block Turnitin, I agree about that as well. However, I cannot help by recall that Neil Postman wrote a book: ‘Technopoly’ which is much about placing a little too much trust in things other than humans. It is not the information that is the issue for me, it is how that information is used or abused that is of concern.
I hope I am wrong about Turnitin and its eventual capacity to claim what of all written is original or not or some degree thereof.
After all, we know it’s all a matter of degree.
— Steve Apr 4, 04:40 PM #