From today’s Chronicle of Higher Education, “Federal Judge Rules That Plagiarism-Detection Tool Does Not Violate Students’ Copyrights.” I have yet to read the whole things and absorb it, but here’s a quote:
Judge Claude M. Hilton, of the U. S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., found that scanning the student papers for the purpose of detecting plagiarism is a “highly transformative” use that falls under the fair-use provision of copyright law. He ruled that the company “makes no use of any work’s particular expressive or creative content beyond the limited use of comparison with other works,” and that the new use “provides a substantial public benefit.”
But this isn’t over yet– appeals from the students who brought the case in the first place are certainly forthcoming.
But hey, the way I look at it, there are lots of other reason other than the copyright issues to not like Turnitin. Like it’s just unethical and criminalizes students and doesn’t work well.