[Air-l] copyright and new media scholarship (was turnitin issue)

[Douglas Eyman]

Dan,

thanks for the background/clarification. I'm an editor of an online journal 
(Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy -- http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/, 
and we are currently wrestling with how to articulate fair use for new media 
scholarship. We get a lot of submissions that incorporate others' work in ways 
that we think constitute fair use, but in the current (over) litigious climate, 
we're trying to figure out how to balance protecting the journal and not 
stifling innovative scholarship. So in a way, the question of turnitin.com as 
one of intellectual property is one facet of trying to figure out how walk this 
tightrope. Your comment about the Supreme Court's actions also helps us to think 
through this (although it unfortunately weighs on the side that we shouldn't 
support academic work that uses remixing or engages new media as sources of 
quotation -- our status as a free (non-commercial) academic journal wouldn't 
have much impact on a fair use ruling it seems).

I'm wondering if others on this list are wrestling with these issues, either as 
editors, scholars who are creating new media scholarly texts, or 
mentors/advisors to students who are interested in doing this kind of work. How 
have you resolved the copyright/IP issues? How have you counseled colleagues and 
students about it?

Doug

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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