[Air-l] turnitin issue

[burkx006 at umn.edu]

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
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