Certainly here in the UK many institutions (like the one linked in the article) require students to assign IPR for their work to the university. The policy linked justifies this partly so that ‘there is parity of treatment between students and staff in relation to IPR’, but there seems to me to be a big difference between work produced by staff who are paid by the university, and by students who pay (directly or indirectly) to be there. I think that by claiming IP rights over students’ work, universities might feel that some of these issues (not including any copyright issues) are moot, but the whole issue of universities claiming these rights is something I also feel is worth looking at.

The fact that Turnitin is run commercially rather than as a non-commercial service of some kind makes me more uncomfortable about the whole thing.

However, I’m definitely not a lawyer, and I do think that if Turnitin is going to be with us for some time we could at least look at ways that students can actually benefit from it through its use as a teaching aid.

I hope you’re right that the debate will continue as I do feel it’s a debate that is needed; it would also be interesting to see how it’s addressed in Scots and English law as well as US.

For anyone interested in reading why the students should have won I suggest reading http://www.iposgoode.ca/2009/06/us-circuit-court-of-appeals-rules-that-turnitins-fight-against-plagiarism-does-not-violate/ or the paper available for download at http://ssrn.com/author=1259310

I wrote both articles after extensive research into copyright and fair use laws and not merely in response to a news article. The students have a strong case and I don’t think we’ve seen the end of this debate.

Essentially, this instructor is saying “I am going to require all of my HONEST students to permanently archive their work FOREVER on servers of questionable security, because I ‘don’t have time'”. This is lame.

Honest Students should NOT be punished, and should retain the right to destroy their papers FOREVER at the end of the term. In fact, destroying the papers would assure that they can’t be copied – FAR better than archiving them forever on crappy Internet-based servers.

Read the terms of that TurnItIn Contract! They admit that they cannot secure them from hackers and require an irrevocable permanent license to be able to store AND SELL the papers.

It’s a bad deal for your honest students, teachers! WAKE UP!

Don’t use TurnItIn because you are too lazy, or don’t “have time to worry about copycats.”