[Air-l] turnitin issue

[Douglas Eyman]

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_060309/20060309?hub=Canada
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/