[Air-l] turnitin issue

[burkx006 at umn.edu]

On Mar 8 2007, Douglas Eyman wrote:

> 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 

I'm afraid I tend to disagree -- that is not what the cases say 
(specifically, see here: 
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=949937&high=%20Mereology 
)

What you have described is essentially the Google Book Search project. The 
strongest argument for Turnitin as "fair use" is the one that Google has 
asserted.

DLB



-- 
Dan L. Burk
Oppenheimer, Wolff & Donnelly Professor
University of Minnesota Law School
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