cyber security: [may 2008]
Published: 04/04/08
- Judge Rules Plagiarism-Detection Tool Falls Under 'Fair Use'
From the article of the same title by: Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education - A federal judge has ruled in favor of a plagiarism-detection tool called Turnitin, giving professors the right to use the service in order to check a student's paper for plagiarism. Judge Claude M. Hilton of the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., decided in March that the tool, which keeps digital copies of students' essays in its database, is included under the fair-use provision of copyright law. He found that the service is of public benefit and that iParadigms, the company that operates Turnitin, only stores the papers so they can be compared with other works. The company was sued in March 2007 by four high school students who wanted $900,000 for the six papers they submitted, claiming that the company was making money off them. Since then, colleges across the country, who pay thousands of dollars each year to use Turnitin, have been following the case. Robert A. Vanderhye, a retired lawyer who is working on the students' case pro bono, plans to appeal, saying that the judge did not consider whether Turnitin breaches student privacy laws. Papers may sometimes include names of students and instructors and other personal information. If a paper matches one stored in the database, the professor can choose to retrieve the old paper and thereby gain access to information about the student-author.
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