By Ira Winkler

I have to admit that when I first heard about a lawsuit by high school students against a plagiarism detection service used by schools, I thought it was going to be about the students whining that they were caught and were looking for a technicality to get out of punishment. However upon reading the full article, I am actually very much in favor of the students’ lawsuit.

Basically, the turnitin.com service works by having students submit their papers to the service, which then compares the papers to ones already in the database to look for plagiarism. The paper itself is then added to the database so that it can be compared to future papers. Students are required to submit their papers, or they get a failing grade on the paper.

While I generally see the purpose of the service, the fact is that the students are right. Their hard work is being used by a for profit service to increase the value of the for profit service. They are basically extorted to contributing to the database, and don’t have a choice to opt out. Frankly, the service should compensate students for use of their papers. While students are not necessarily entitled to a presumption of innocence per criminal standards, there should be a general assumption that the student is innocent of plagiarism. The current mentality in use by turnitin.com and their subscriber schools is a presumption of guilt. That is wrong, and fundamentally the use of the students’ papers without compensation is a violation of copyrighted materials.

Related posts:

1. The Convention on Cybercrime: Why It Will Do Far More Harm Than Good
2. From the Trenches: Why Hard-Coding Entitlements into the Application are Bad
3. Looking for things to worry about?
4. The New Discovery Process
5. Commissioning a Crime is As Bad As Committing the Crime

Posted by Ira.Winkler on Saturday, April 21st, 2007, at 3:33 am, and filed under Articles.

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