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Copyright in School Work?
TurnItIn.com is a service for teachers to screen for plagiarism in student papers. The teachers submit student work to TurnItIn.com that compares it to other students' papers, encyclopedia entries, etc. The disgruntled students are now fighting back in court, claiming that the service violates the copyrights in their work. TurnItIn.com makes and retains copies of student's work to then use it as a database for its plagiarism detection algorithm.
The complaint can be found here. TurnItIn.com has a memo posted discussing their legal analysis of the issue. Prof. Volokh from UCLA has some thoughts about the issue.
Personally, I am unpersuaded by the transformative use argument in this case.
Assuming the use is infringing, a completely different issue is whether schools can force students to relinquish their copyrights as part of their enrollment in the school. Scholarly journals require authors to give up all or most of their rights in return for publication. Can a school require students to relinquish their rights in return for a grade/credit? How does the answer to this question change considering that primary education is compulsory?
Posted by at March 31, 2007 1:01 PM
in Current Events
