[Air-l] turnitin issue

[Douglas Eyman]

Dan,

thanks for this cite -- your work on the Google Books issues is really 
interesting (especially for those of us who are interested in both IP and 
database issues).

But I'll have to disagree with your disagreement a bit :) -- Google Books' 
economic model doesn't currently charge users for access to the text (and they 
restrict it as well), whereas Turnitin.com does charge directly for access to 
the copyrighted works in its database. I think it is certainly feasible to make 
a kind of fair use case, but I'm less concerned about that issue than how 
instructors and institutions manage their relationships with students through 
the lens of using the system. (And besides, given that there has been no 
litigation that has resulted in a ruling on whether Turnitin.com's use is indeed 
fair use, it remains an unresolved (an unresolvable until litigated) question.)

Doug

burkx006 at umn.edu wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
>