Lawsuit Againt Anti-Cheating Company

The Washington Post is reporting on a lawsuit involving two Fairfax County (VA) and two Arizona students who are suing Turnitin, a company that helps schools check for plagarism. Their theory is that the service makes offers a commercial service using copyrighted material.

Two McLean High School students have launched a court challenge against a California company hired by their school to catch cheaters, claiming the anti-plagiarism service violates copyright laws.

The lawsuit, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, seeks $900,000 in damages from the for-profit service known as Turnitin. The service seeks to root out cheaters by comparing student term papers and essays against a database of more than 22 million student papers as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals. In the process, the student papers are added to the database.

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Kevin Wade, that plaintiff's father, said he thinks schools should focus on teaching students cheating is wrong.

"You can't take a person's work and run it through a computer and make an honest person out of them," Wade said. "My son's major objection is that he does not cheat, and this assumes he does. This case is not about money, and we don't expect to get that."

I don't know enough about copyright law to make a judgment about the merits of their case, but I included the quote from the father for a different reason.

First, while the school has a role in preventing cheating and should instruct students about the consequences of cheating, parents are the ultimate teachers about cheating. The schools are simply trying to prevent students from benefiting from nefarious means.

Second, I don't think that school systems using Turnitin or other similar services assume that their students are cheating, but are simply taking care that cheaters don't prosper. But if one were to look at some previous op-eds carried in the Washington Post, one could easily see that teachers know that some dishonesty is going on, whether intentional or not.

Third and finally, if the boy doesn't cheat, why then worry? He is not being singled out since I am sure that all papers that are turned in get the same treatment. Likewise, I am sure that other copyrighted material is in turnitin's database. If I were to hold a copyright on material, I would not want others using my words and thoughts without attribution and so would not object to my material being used by Turnitin and others to protect my copyright.

This will, no doubt, be an interesting case.