Last year a group of students decided to fight back against the plagiarism tool being used by their school. Before submitting an assignment to Turnitin, one of the students submitted all the legal documents to register the original paper as a copyrighted work.
Turnitin is a service that scrutinizes papers to determine if any part of the work has been plagiarized. Turnitin does this by comparing all submitted papers with what is on the Internet in addition to all other documents submitted (about 100,000 per day) by subscribers to the service.
The argument by the students was that Turnitin was infringing on the copyright holder’s exclusive rights and also making money in the process. To prove the point, the students jumped through all the hoops required to register a paper with the US copyright office and then filed a suite against Turnitin for copyright infringement.
It didn’t work. Judge Claude M. Hilton has thrown the case out in a US District Court in Virginia.
Hilton found that iParadigm’s use of the students’ essays was transformative and valuable. In contrast, student essays in their normal form were viewed as having no market, and their reuse by turnitin did not in any way diminish the students’ “incentive for creativity”—namely, their grades.
Until a teenager writes a best seller, the market for high school creative writing assignments isn’t likely to expand.
2 Responses to Turnitin’s method is fair use