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The Podium

Blog posts tagged with 'Copyright'

Tuesday, April 21

Copyright & Cheating

By Brad

The website TurnItIn.com offers a web-based plagiarism detection service used by teachers to keep students honest. As part of the service, the site adds full term papers to a database, where it’s used for future plagiarism checks.

The database led to students from Virginia and Arizona to sue TurnItIn. The accusation was copyright infringement. But now, via Ars Technica, comes word that after two years of arguing the lawsuit has been thrown out:

TurnItIn has known for years that this would be a sensitive issue, and in 2002 commissioned an opinion from law firm Foley & Lardner. The group concluded that the use of the papers constituted fair use, but admitted that “the archival of a submitted work is perhaps the most legally sensitive aspect of the TURNITIN system.” The lawyers argue that because the text is not displayed or distributed to anyone, it can hardly be called “infringement.” Fair use should allow TurnItIn to do what it does.

A federal court agreed that this was legal, for two reasons. First, TurnItIn required students to enter into a “binding agreement” when they uploaded papers to the site. Second, TurnItIn’s use was “fair” according to the four factors found in US copyright law, with most weight being given to the “transformative” nature of what TurnItIn was doing with the papers.

Wednesday, April 15

Cracking Down on Copyright

By Brad

Recently, a French law that would sever the Internet connection of online pirates went down in defeat. Now, Ars Technica reports, South Korea has picked up the idea:

South Korea is crazy for baseball—it’s national team made it to recent finals of the World Baseball Classic, only to lose to Japan—so it seems especially appropriate that the country would be one of the first in the world to adopt an official “three strikes” policy toward copyright infringement on the Internet. While the government can order the disconnection of individual users, a key emphasis here appears to be on websites. Host some infringing content, and the government can shut you down at its discretion.

There’s a problem with focusing on individual websites, however:

An anonymous source summed up the problem for the paper: “It is virtually impossible for Web portals to totally filter illegal content when there are millions of postings coming up everyday. And I am talking about companies that spend massive amounts of money to monitor copyright violations and hire hundreds of monitoring personnel. I mean, how much does the government expect us to spend in developing and operating a simple Web service? No matter how hard we try, the culture minister will easily find his three strikes and could order us to shutdown a site at anytime, regardless of whether the copyright holder has a problem with us or not.”

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

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