p2pnet - rss feed: Turnitin doesn’t break copyrights: US ruling
p2pnet news | Freedom:- Depending on which side of which fence you happen to be sitting, anti-plagiarism company Turnitin is either famous, or infamous.
In Canada, a year ago, two students claimed it violates copyright laws and sued it for almost $1 million in damages.
But in the US, a federal judge has ruled it doesn’t infringe students’ copyrights, “even though it stores digital copies of their essays in the database that the company uses to check works for academic dishonesty,” says the Chronicle of Higher Education.
To the contrary, judge Claude M. Hilton decided scanning the papers to find plagiarism was a “highly transformative” use that falls under the fair-use provision of copyright law.
“He ruled that the company ‘makes no use of any work’s particular expressive or creative content beyond the limited use of comparison with other works,’ and that the new use ‘provides a substantial public benefit’,” says the story, also saying
“The decision also has wider implications for other digital services, such as Google’s effort to scan books in major libraries and add them to its index for search purposes.
But, “I’m definitely appealing,” the Chronicle quotes Robert A. Vanderhye, a retired lawyer in Virginia who took on the students’ case pro bonom, saying.
“I am positive that the appellate court will reverse” on the fair-use issue.
The judge, he said, “copied” the company’s brief.
“He didn’t even consider any of our arguments.”
Also See:
violates copyright laws - Students sue Turnitin, March 30, 2007
Chronicle of Higher Education - Federal Judge Rules That Plagiarism-Detection Tool Does Not Violate Students’ Copyrights, March 26, 2008
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March 28th, 2008 at 7:41 am
Its the IAGE and a law designed for the guttenberg-edison ages.
This is a rather confusing situation as a result of the application of the fair use section of the copyright law.
Fair use should be renamed fairLY useLESS, since no one can understand the vague terminology in the law and the related jurisprudence and the even more vague arguments used by kawyers and judges when recurring to the fair use argument/justification.
It is absurd that to use a fair use benefit in the law, it will rquire a judge to finally decide, after the facts, arbitrarily, that infringement did or did not ocurr.
Now, the problem in the current case is that the use of the works is to prevent infringement by first infringing. Rather ironic, a paradox
The root of the problem is that legislators are too busy raising electoral money (and the related activity of helping obbyists) and getting reelected that they have not had the time to totally redo the copyrigh act to make it workable for the IAGE (Internet Age).
In a way I feel sorry for the lawyers, judges, parties involved in this case because they are trapped and have to work with a totally useless (as applied to the case) copyright law. Its impossible to work in the IAGE with a law designed for the guttenberg-edison ages.