p2p news / p2pnet:- What’s a term-paper mill? It’s an operation selling exam papers so students can pass them off as their own without having actually done any work.

In what may be the first case of its kind, graduate student Blue Macellari has sued three web sites, accusing them of selling one of her papers without her permission.

She claims Rusty R. Carroll and his R2C2 company, “violated her copyright, invaded her privacy, and damaged her reputation” and is asking for more than $100,000 in damages, says the Chronicle for Higher Education, going on that also named is ISP Digitalsmiths, based in Beaufort, South Carolina. The hosting company “knows or should know” that its clients’ sites contain unauthorized copies of copyrighted works, says the story.

The company site says, “Digitalsmiths is in the business of inventing answers.”

“According to the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for Southern Illinois, in East St. Louis, one of Ms. Macellari’s friends was doing a Google search and noticed that Ms. Macellari’s paper was on a term-paper site called Doing My Homework. Ms. Macellari, a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, says she wrote the paper in 1999 while she was studying at the University of Cape Town during her junior year abroad. After her friend told her about the first site, Ms. Macellari discovered that the paper was also available at two other sites, Free for Essays and Free for Term Papers.”

In a jam? – asks Free for Term Papers. “Can’t seem to come up with any ideas for that essay or term paper you have due tomorrow? You’ve come to the right place! We have thousands of free essays and term papers!”

“Colleges have long been frustrated by Web sites that sell or give away collections of term papers, and some states have enacted laws that attempt to restrict the sale of term papers,” says the Chronicle story. “Ms. Macellari’s case, though, is unusual because it is being brought by a student who complains that her intellectual property has been stolen by a term-paper Web site.”

Colleges would “love to find a way to sue these people, and there are some state laws that have been tried but haven’t been prosecuted very aggressively,” Gary Pavela, director of judicial programs at the University of Maryland at College Park is quoted as sayig. “This might be one of the avenues that could begin to shut them down.”

In a continuing, anonymous survey of 48,000 students, conducted since 2002 by Donald L. McCabe at Rutgers University at Newark, 4% of respondents “acknowledge having downloaded a term paper from a Web site,” adds the story.

“But Mr. McCabe said he expected that more students use the sites than admit it. ‘I would guess it’s at least 10 percent who have resorted to it at some point or another’.”

(Thanks, May)

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See:-
Chronicle for Higher Education - Student Sues Term-Paper Web Sites for Selling One of Her Papers, September 1, 2005

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