Judge Rules That Turnitin Does Not Violate Students' Copyrights
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Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 03/31/2008
Four Virginia and Arizona high school students hoping to score a legal hit against Turnitin have been rebuffed: a federal district court judge in Virginia recently threw out their lawsuit, ruling that the plagiarism detection company does not violate the copyright of students, even though it stores digital copies of their essays to check future submissions for academic dishonesty.The suit began in October 2006 when students belonging to a self-styled "Committee for Students' Rights" at McLean High School in Virginia argued that when Turnitin's parent, iParadigms, retained their assigned papers in its databases, that practice constituted copyright infringement.
"The objection is that Turnitin.com is making a lot of money off the database," said McLean student Leo Brett in 2006. "The database is their selling point. Without the database it's just a search engine. So they need our papers to make the database. And they're profiting off it."
Teachers who use Turnitin can find out if a student has plagiarized his/her paper by submitting it online. The service runs the paper through its database, which houses millions of previously submitted student papers and Internet-based commercial and academic content. An "Originality Report" is then issued. If the teacher's and students' educational institution involved approves, Turnitin adds the student paper to its digital archives.
In his opinion, Judge Claude Hilton of the Eastern District of Virginia, ruled that fair use was not violated because under federal law, the unauthorized use of copyrighted work for purposes such as teaching, scholarship, and research "is not an infringement of copyright." Fair use allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders.
The judge also addressed the students' claim that they were forced to submit their work to Turnitin by school rules. "Schools have a right to decide how to monitor and address plagiarism in their schools and may employ companies like iParadigms to help do so," he wrote. "As the Supreme Court has recognized in the constitutional context, 'the rights of students in public school are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings' and 'the rights of students must be applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment.'"
