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Intellectual Property
With all the Sturm und Drang about the Georgia State law- suit and the Section 108 Study Group findings, reaction to a federal court's decision in the Turnitin copyright in- fringement lawsuit has been buried. This is unfortunate because the Turnitin litigation says a lot about our society, both in terms of copyright and education. (The case is A. V, et al., v. IParadigms, LLC, Civil Action No. 07-0293, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.)
For those who are unaware, Turnitin (http://turnitin.com) is an online software program whose creator, iParadigms, LLC, promotes it as an "intellectual property protection" service. It's interesting that iParadigms chooses to promote what essentially is a plagiarism detection service as an intellectual property protection service, since plagiarism is a moral offense without civil or criminal penalty, while intellectual property violations typically have civil and criminal penalties. To me, the way iParadigms positions Turnitin as an intellectual property compliance solution is another attempt to frame intellectual property protection as a moral issue that requires nothing more than unsubstantiated allegations instead of a legal issue that requires compliance with evidence and burdens of proof.
Calculating the Cost per Student
Schools at all levels sign up with iParadigms to use Turnitin; teachers then submit completed student assignments to the service for a "similarity assessment." The assessment compares the student's work to information iParadigms has gathered from internet sources, a library of published articles, and millions of previously submitted student papers. An article published on March 13, 2007, in Business-Week magazine's online edition estimates that iParadigms charges educational institutions 80 cents per student to use Turnitin and claims the service receives about 120,000 papers per day.
Since I am not neutral on Turnitin, let me state my opinions clearly. The university where I have been teaching for the last several years uses Turnitin. I have co-taught other classes that require students to submit their papers to Turnitin as a condition of submission. I have seen the assessment reports the service spits out and reviewed those reports with students.
But I refuse to use Turnitin for my own classes. First, I think the service's accuracy is questionable. It best detects word-for-word instances of content copy- ing. Of course, these examples...