Students sue Turnitin for copyright violation

[tedster]

This is an intriguing copyright law tangle.

The lawsuit, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, seeks $900,000 in damages from the for-profit service known as Turnitin. The service seeks to root out cheaters by comparing student term papers and essays against a database of more than 22 million student papers as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals. In the process, the student papers are added to the database....

"But it seems like Turnitin is a commercial use. They turn around and sell this service, and it's expensive. And the service only works because they get these papers."

Washington Post article [washingtonpost.com]

[Jane_Doe]

I think the kids should win.

[BigDave]

I would love to hear how turnitin is going to defend against this suit. They just don't have any of the defenses that search engines or even scrapers have.

In this case, the students registered their copyrights and specifically stated that the works were NOT to be added to the database. There are no implied licenses like open websites have, these are works that were only distributed to their teachers. Turnitin does not provide any free services, and there is no value to the students.

I would be shocked if the students don't win.

[plumsauce]

This would set a very useful precedent.

It would be great if commercial scrapers were put on notice that their activities could be successfully challenged.

I have in mind specifically those "copyright enforcement" bots that mindlessly hammer servers looking for infringements of their clients material while polluting traffic logs.

[BigDave]

It's unlikely to have much effect on the copyright bots. Different medium with different standards. You are opening up your website to be read by posting it on the web. You are granting an implicit license for it to be read. The student's papers are registered, yet unpublished, works where no publication or distribution rights had ever been granted. In fact, they were explicitly denied.

The idea is similar, but the differences are significant enough that it is unlikely to shut them down.