Turnitin is fair use

According to a press release I just was on PR Newswire, a United States District Court judge in Virginia has granted summary judgment in favor of the defendant iParadigms in relation to their Turnitin(R) Plagiarism Detection Service.

The case, A.V. et. al v. iParadigms, LLC, No.07-293 (E.D. Va. 2007) began when four high school students complained about their school’s practice of checking papers for plagiarism using the web-based plagiarism detection service. The students claimed that their copyright in their papers was being violated because papers submitted to Turnitin are incorporated into the Turnitin database to prevent future collusion.

I have not seen the court’s decision yet, but the outcome seems correct as a matter of copyright law and common sense (which do not always coincide). My understanding is that iParadigms also based their defense on a contractual argument. iParadigms copying should be considered fair use in spite of the fact that they are a commercial entity copying the entirety of the plaintiff’s work (two factors that in some cases suggest no fair use should be found).

The critical reason why iParadigms should benefit from fair use in this case is that although they are copying the work, they are not using the work for its expressive value. In fact, works in the database will never be read by a human except to confirm the computer’s assessment that one work is a copy of another. The students here suffer no loss of control of their expressive works; they just don’t get to control the use of the works as data for a plagiarism detection algorithm. In essence then, this case is about whether authors get the exclusive right to control the use of meta-data relating to their works, as such it has significance that goes well beyond this specific application.

I am tackling the issue of the non-expressive use of expressive works more generally in a forthcoming article.

Matthew Sag

Comments

[Tabitha]

Hello,

I am the product manager for iParadigms,LLC (makers of Turnitin). I just thought you might like to know that Judge Hilton has released his Order and Memorandum Opinion. The judgement was very favorable for Turnitin. If you would like to read the opinion, it is available at:
http://www.iparadigms.com/iParadigms_03-11-08_Opinion.pdf