[Air-l] turnitin issue

[James Whyte]

It occurs to me that requiring a student to agree to Turnitin as a requirement for a course may be a "contract" made under duress and therefore subject to challenge.
   
  Refusal to submit to any kind of self disclosure is evidence of nothing. Particularly true in U.S. public institutions. (Constitutionally determined)
   
  I would hope that we are teaching people to advocate for themselves. The student that Barry mentions is remarkable on many levels. She must be pretty sure her work is clean.
   
  James
   
  

burkx006 at umn.edu wrote:
  Hi Doug --

First, I agree about the separate issue of instructors managaing 
relationships with students.

As far as the copyright question goes, no fair use configuration is *ever* 
resolved until litigated. But that doesn't mean that we can't do a good 
extrapolation from decided cases. And one thing the Supreme Court has been 
fairly clear on is that the commercial/non-commercial distinction is not 
determinative, or even very important, in fair use. So that doesn't really 
count against Turnitin or for Google on the analysis.

If there is a difference between Google Books and Turnitin, I would say 
that it is in the public benefit of the resulting database. The potential 
public benefits of the Google digitized library are enormous; the public 
benefits of the Turnitin database are much more modest. DLB

On Mar 9 2007, Douglas Eyman wrote:

>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
>> 
>> 
>> 
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-- 
Dan L. Burk
Oppenheimer, Wolff & Donnelly Professor
University of Minnesota Law School
229 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
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