Fair Use, Turnitin, And... Why Google Never Should Have Caved On Book Scanning
from the bad-news-all-around dept
Last year, we wrote about a district court decision that noted iParadigm's popular Turnitin plagiarism checker service wasn't violating copyright by adding every student's paper to its database, noting that this was fair use. Wired points out that an appeals court has upheld this ruling and links to Thomas O'Toole's quick summary of why this is fair use:The court stepped through the fair use analysis, dropping positive notes here (commercial uses can be fair uses), here (a use can be transformative "in function or purpose without altering or actually adding to the original work," citing Perfect 10 Inc. v. Amazon.com Inc.), and here (fact that turnitin.com used the entirety of the plaintiff's work did not preclude finding of fair use). And it turned back a lot of other, small-bore challenges to the district court's fair use finding.While O'Toole rushes through these points, they're actually pretty important, since they're quite often misunderstood by people (even copyright lawyers) who claim that commercial use isn't fair use, or that using an entire work can't be fair use or can't be transformative. In this case, the court lays out why none of that is true. When the original decision came out, I suggested that all of these points could be helpful to Google in defending its book scanning efforts, since it could make pretty much the identical arguments on all points. It's scanning was a commercial use, but transformative (it was for indexing/searching books, not reading them), it was making use of the entire work, but again, in a transformative way.
Unfortunately, as we all know, Google caved in that lawsuit and settled -- though, now we're watching as many are challenging whether the settlement terms are legal or reasonable. I still think Google should have stuck with the pure fair use defense, showing that its use was transformative and different - similar to just indexing websites for linking purposes. Not only is it unfortunate that Google gave this up, because it's one less strong precedent over fair use, but it's now opened up the ridiculous claims by a bunch of other industries (newspapers, recording) demanding that Google "settle" with them as well, and hand over cash. Google's decision to back down was a big mistake, not just in terms of screwing over others trying to scan books (what most of the current complaints are about), but in denying a strong fair use precedent and making Google look like an easy place for struggling industries to demand cash.
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Filed Under: commercial use, fair use, four factors, turnitin
Companies: google, iparadigms, turnitin
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Re:
You just gave me an idea of a way students could make it difficult for teachers to use Turnitin: They could just turn their own papers in to Turnitin under a pseudonym before turning them to their teachers! Of course, they would need to first establish proof that they were indeed the original author but there a ways to pretty well do that (and I don't want to get into the details here, thanks). Now if enough students began doing that, effectively polluting Turnitin's results, Teachers would probably have to quit using it! I mean it probably wouldn't take many well publicized cases of false accusal to do the trick.
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Re: Re: Re:
Oh really? And just what do you think they could fail them for?
Failing students for no good reason can get a teacher in a lot of hot water, or even fired, while the student gets their work reevaluated more objectively by a review board. I've seen it happen.
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Re:
It uses the students name and email address to determine authorship and will automatically exclude other work by the same author as potential plagiarism. Note, you can still be caught in it if you use a different email address and the same name, so try to be consistent.
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Re:
What is the purpose of writing a paper? Is it the product or the process. In nearly all school settings the paper itself is completely secondary to the research, editing and refinement that is the real purpose. Reusing a paper avoids the work.
Should a budding basketball player shoot 50 fouls shots a day, or shoot one really good one, video it and just replay it 50 times a day?
In the end its the same - it is the practice that produces the results.
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yes you can
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Can't fault Google for settling
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Re: Can't fault Google for settling
I can understand a short sighted business decision or at least one done that made sense from a numbers stand point to them. However, I think we all hold Google to a higher standard and them doing settling the case just showcases how Google is now just like every other corporation.
Freedom
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weakening itself
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Re: weakening itself
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Media Literacy Fair Use
Regarding Google's decision to settle out of court, it is a bit disappointing. We would have loved to have seen them take this all the way and win it. Thanks C.T. for the information on the different circuits and their interpretations of fair use. These things can get quite tricky when it comes down to a judge's political leanings as the final issue.
But for now, it's important that we are all educated on our fair use rights no matter what "side" we're on.
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Re:
Maybe you both plagiarized from the same source.
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fair use my ass
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A couple of questions to clarify your points...
1) By this, do you mean to say that you don't care what the law is or just that you disagree with people who believe the law allows for Turnitin's use of your works?
2) If the latter, on what grounds to you disagree? As the TD post points out, just because a profit is made, it does not mean that fair use can't apply. Based on your subject line, it sounds to me like your opinion is based more on what you believe the law should be rather than what it is.
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Opportunity Knocking
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Re: Opportunity Knocking
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/internet-archive-wants-book-copyright-i ndemnity-like-google.ars
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digital fair use issues in Turnitin
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Question
If so, I would think that some big name publishing corp would not be happy about it, or would want to monitize their IP. Does Turnitin havve some arrangement with them?
If not, why? If it is ok, then what are they waiting for?
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What does this mean?
from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnitin
Since Turnitin archives all papers it receives and sells its services, including that database, for profit, ...
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Fair Use... pffft
There's a number of key points that sway this debate for me:
1. Is the key to your profitability, i.e., your business model, hinge upon the uniqueness of an author's work.
2. Is this work accessed often, weekly, daily, hourly.
3. Is the amalgamation of these works considered an asset to the company, i.e., if this data were lost would there be considerable financial loss to the company.
So in Turnitin's case you would find that their cash flow is tied to using the works, more specifically the uniqueness of each individual work. They likely access these works, or the data subset representing the work, on an extremely frequent basis. And if they lost their database of papers, they would be severely financially crippled.
So tell me, how is this fair use if I, the author, have lost control over how my original work is utilized?
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newest jordan shoes
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Plagiarism Checker accounts
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