After the dismissal of Turnitin.com lawsuit by district court, Web site will continue to exist
Graham Rogers
Issue date: 3/31/08 Section: Features
Students looking to purchase papers or surreptitiously copy a few lines of a scholarly article into their own would be advised to refrain from doing so - at least for a while longer.
District court judge Claude Hilton ruled this month that the services offered by anti-cheating Web site Turnitin.com do not violate any intellectual property laws, and the site can continue checking the originality of student work - a ruling that came as no surprise to both Turnitin and students alike.
"On the face of it, the lawsuit didn't make a lot of sense," Turnitin founder and CEO John Barrie said. "I think a lot of people were expecting this to turn out the way it did."
A lawsuit filed in March of 2007 by two Virginia high school students contended that Turnitin.com violated the intellectual property rights of the students who submitted papers to the site.
Turnitin automatically archives the papers it receives and adds them to the database against which it checks later works. The students argued that because Turnitin charges a fee for schools to subscribe to the service, it profits from the use of student papers without asking or compensating the student.
One of the plaintiffs claimed that Turnitin had archived a paper he had submitted, even though he had submitted it with instructions that it was not to be added to the database. The plaintiffs had sought $900,000 in damages from Turnitin.
Many in the education industry watched the case closely, as more than 8,400 schools and universities in 103 countries, including Harvard University and Georgetown University, currently use Turnitin's services. Its database currently totals over 50 million works, including scholarly articles, and the site receives around 125,000 submissions daily.
The case was also watched closely as a legal precedent regarding intellectual property rights in general - it was particularly relevant to a case involving the Google.com search engine's practice of scanning books and adding them to its index for search purposes. Several groups representing authors and publishers are suing the search engine, claiming that it failed to obtain permission from the works' originators before scanning them. The Turnitin case will likely bolster Google's position.
District court judge Claude Hilton ruled this month that the services offered by anti-cheating Web site Turnitin.com do not violate any intellectual property laws, and the site can continue checking the originality of student work - a ruling that came as no surprise to both Turnitin and students alike.
"On the face of it, the lawsuit didn't make a lot of sense," Turnitin founder and CEO John Barrie said. "I think a lot of people were expecting this to turn out the way it did."
A lawsuit filed in March of 2007 by two Virginia high school students contended that Turnitin.com violated the intellectual property rights of the students who submitted papers to the site.
Turnitin automatically archives the papers it receives and adds them to the database against which it checks later works. The students argued that because Turnitin charges a fee for schools to subscribe to the service, it profits from the use of student papers without asking or compensating the student.
One of the plaintiffs claimed that Turnitin had archived a paper he had submitted, even though he had submitted it with instructions that it was not to be added to the database. The plaintiffs had sought $900,000 in damages from Turnitin.
Many in the education industry watched the case closely, as more than 8,400 schools and universities in 103 countries, including Harvard University and Georgetown University, currently use Turnitin's services. Its database currently totals over 50 million works, including scholarly articles, and the site receives around 125,000 submissions daily.
The case was also watched closely as a legal precedent regarding intellectual property rights in general - it was particularly relevant to a case involving the Google.com search engine's practice of scanning books and adding them to its index for search purposes. Several groups representing authors and publishers are suing the search engine, claiming that it failed to obtain permission from the works' originators before scanning them. The Turnitin case will likely bolster Google's position.
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