Anti-plagiarism site sued for copyright infringement

April 2nd, 2007 • 1 comment copyright, education, web

Late last week, TechDirt chronicled an interesting article about Turnitin being sued for copyright infringement. I find this amazing. At my last job, I actually helped implement Turnitin campus-wide and it was a great success with the faculty but of course, hit a sour note with the less-than-original plagiarising students.

Apparently, these kids blatantly set up Turnitin to get sued. They registered their copyrighted papers before turning them into their teachers who then turned them into Turnitin. Now, they’ve turned around and sued for nearly $1MUSD in “damages” for these straight A students’ papers, that’s $150,000 a piece for each of the 6 papers turned in. Then one of the student’s fathers says this isn’t about money. If not, why are you suing a valuable educational resource for $150,000 for your child’s essay? I doubt they’re a literary genius and get paid handsomely for each of the essays they write in or outside of school. If it wasn’t about money, they’d be suing for Turnitin to change its entire business model and data warehousing techniques, not for $150,000 in “damages”.

I’m utterly flabbergasted not only by this obviously fake statement from a parent but by sheer insanity of the entire act. Would the students be far more at ease turning their papers in and then finding them for sale weeks later on the Internet? I don’t think so. Turnitin doesn’t do any commercial business off their database, they’re not selling the works whatsoever they’re simply selling access to it. They provide a service, not an end product. These students apparently think that Turnitin is archiving all of their data and selling it on some highly secretive literary black market for insane profits.

America is the land of a quick buck and it seems parents are startin’em early!