Students sue anti-plagiarism site for copyright infringement - Download Squad

Got a term paper to write? No problem, just fire up the old internet
connection and copy some text from Wikipedia. Of course, in the good
old days, you had to copy off of a neighbor or buy a copy of a paper
some other student had written a few years ago.

Hoever,
modern technology means more than just new ways to cheat. It also means
new ways to catch cheaters. A couple of years ago, many schools started
turning to plagiarism checking software like Turnitin. The software includes a large database of documents, and when a paper is uploaded the program checks it against that database.

But
here’s the thing. It then adds that paper to the database for future
reference. And it doesn’t ask your permission. So a couple of high
school students decided to sue Turnitin for copyright violation.

To
strengthen their case, they obtained copyrights for 6 papers that were
submitted to Turnitin, and are seeking $150 thousand in damages for
each violation, for a total of $900 thousand. One paper even included
instructions that it was not to be added to the database. It was anyway.

Powered by ScribeFire.