arstechnica.com — Four students from Arizona and Virginia have filed suit against plagiarism detection system Turnitin.com, arguing that the service engages in massive copyright infringement. The lawsuit, filed this week in a Virginia federal court, claims that the infringement is willful and that Turnitin's parent company iParadigms owes $150,000 for every violatio
Mar 30, 2007 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountMar 31, 2007
Right now my son is only 3 years old but as a parent when my son goes into middle school or high school and they ask him to submit a paper to a website be sure that i'm going to read their terms and conditions. I don't understand why you can't opt out from using the service if you don't agree with the terms of the website. If the school wants to have this kind of policy i have the option as a parent to take my son out of that school since they do get money for every student attending that school. Students and parents should be able to opt out from a service they don't find useful and parents should take a bigger role in how their kids are treated and what services they use. Submitting work to a website like this or get a 0 would make me not want to take my son to that school.
gemlarinMar 31, 2007
Oh, has anyone forwarded this news onto any of the big media outlets to try and get this spotlighted?
ihate2reg4uMar 31, 2007
I have to say something about this, "the only people hurt by plagiarism are the plagiarists" nonsense. What you people fail to understand is that those who put an emphasis on "social skills" in high-school and college over studying often DO get ahead in "the real world." Think the drunken frat boy who spent his entire academic years drinking and drugging and screwing anything that isn't nailed to the floor. In all is frat get-togethers he meet lots of people, lots of people with the means to pull strings to get him anywhere he wants to go in life. All he really needs from his education is a paper saying he graduated. After that, the moron might even become president someday! Wouldn't that be the ultimate joke? What if some nerdy left-wing, effete, intellectual guy at Yale agreed to write some papers for Bush just to make a little extra cash thinking, "he's only hurting himself"?
paul1991Mar 31, 2007
I hate those stupid students that dont do their work. They are low IQed in the first place and they they make themselves look dumber by doing stuff like this. If they just did their school work, they would not have to worry about it.
Closed AccountMar 31, 2007
lol!
koickMar 31, 2007
@ISurfTooMuch:I'm actually agreeing with the frustration. My point is your conflict lies with your school (who is using turnitin) -- the students should organize/protest and say that it's not acceptable to use turnitin's services (i.e. you wouldn't have a problem with that company if your school didn't force you to use them, so get the school to stop using them).
alien21010Mar 31, 2007
For all those who are saying that if you agree to the TOS, that you no longer have rights to sue:Not true. Just because you agree to the TOS, does not mean you automatically are bound by them in a court of law. You cannot agree to certain terms, period, and the presence of these terms thereby may indicate that an entire TOS agreement may be thrown out, or declared null and void. These kids have a great shot of actually winning this case. In any result, the result of this case will produce some valuable case law for future copyright infringment cases at the very least.
zhulienApr 17, 2007
hahaha, you have to give away your work to a company you may hate in order to pass... me, I would refuse, but that's just me - perhaps they could compensate me in some way and it could lure me into selling them a copy of my work, not sure until it happened.
firstmargaretAug 16, 2007
Splendid! I've never paid so much attention to this before. <a class="user" href="http://birdtalks.blogspot.com">http://birdtalks.blogspot.com</a>