Yes! I've been trying to tell people this since high school almost 10 years ago. Many educators force students to submit their papres to Turnitin or else take a failing grade on the assignment (which is often a final project which can cause you to fail the course).
1. Turnitin cites fair use ("it's educational"), but one of the metrics of fair use is the extent of use (they use the whole thing), if it's used for profit (they are), and the affect of merchantability. As shady as it sounds, paper mills are not illegal, copyright infringement is. If a paper mill rejects your paper because it's been through turnitin, that hurts me as an author.
2. Another aspect of the monetization that really grinds my gears is that every paper I am forced to submit benefits turnitin by making their database larger and thus helping grant them a monopoly in this market. I am being forced to write articles for the monetary benefit of a company. If they're making money off my paper I want a cut.
3. Turnitin does not offer any way to remove one's documents from their database. If it was merely being used temporarily to compare for plagiarism against internet or book sources then that'd be reasonable. But they keep my papers forever and will continue to monetize them for years after the fact.
I understand the plight of educators that want to stop plagiarism, but forcing me to irrevocably offer royalty-free licenses for my work to a for-profit company that is then charging the school (which if it is public is being funded by my tax dollars) is just insane any way you slice it.
Unfortunately the courts sided with Turnitin on this issue back in 2007 and 2009 and somehow ruled that their for-profit use was fair use.
If they're making money off my paper I want a cut.
They don't make any money by distributing your work. Nor does the quality of your work in any way affect how they make money off of it. I can't know if this is technically a violation of copyright, but -- it doesn't seem like it is against the spirit of copyright. Anymore than the requirement that you give a copy to your professor to grade.
I understand the plight of educators that want to stop plagiarism, but forcing me to irrevocably offer royalty-free licenses for my work to a for-profit company that is then charging the school (which if it is public is being funded by my tax dollars) is just insane any way you slice it.
I could be misunderstanding the situation, but from your own post you are granting no such license -- they are legally allowed to archive these. Copyright applies when you make and distribute a copy of the work, and they aren't (that I know of) doing any such thing.
(Disclaimer: I don't know anything about turnitin, so I'm not defending them in particular -- just responding to the objections of their model raised by OP.)
Yeah, that's the dirty trick. Turnitin hides behind the fact that your professors are the ones that force you to use it, and to use Turnitin you have to register and agree to their terms, which includes letting them use and keep your stuff.
So in reality half the battle is trying to persuade you professor to respect your copyright. I don't mind granting my professor a temporary license to evaluate my work, but I don't wish to give him permission to turn around and give a copy to someone else.
In the court case surrounding this issue the judge basically ruled along the lines of "minors in school don't have rights anyway so this is a moot point", but in university this probably a more legally viable issue.
>I don't mind granting my professor a temporary license to evaluate my work
That's a weird thing to say, and I'm not sure you understand when a license is and is not needed.
If you write an essay and hand me a physical copy, I can then do whatever I want with that copy. I can read it, I can shred it, I can put it in a filing cabinet to gather dust for 20 years.[1] I can even give, sell, or lend it to a friend! I can do all this without needing any special license, because I own the copy you have given me.
What copyright prevents is me photocopying, scanning, or even laboriously hand copying it, and then passing those copies to other people. But while you own the IP, I own the physical copy.
With digital works, the rules are a little different -- if you e-mail me a PDF, sending it to someone else would count as creating a copy, and I'd need your license to do so. But the essential fact is I don't need a special license to hold on to a copy of it. And if you give me permission to send it to someone else, once they have it they can hang onto it as well.
[1] Universities will of course have policies on how faculty handle student work, but that's an orthogonal issue to that of copyright.
I'm sure you are familiar with non-disclosure agreements. Those, and many other, possibly implicit, agreements severely limit what you may do with your 'physical copy'. 'Owning' the copy in no way entitles you to do with it whatever you want. Even telling others you own the copy is something that is easy to forbid.
I was taking issue of the OPs use of the word "license." A license grants you additional rights you would not otherwise possess.
If I'm discussing what actions are, by default, allowed -- well, it isn't very useful to tag a clause onto every statement saying "Unless a legal contract/agreement prevents you from doing otherwise."
That's taken as understood, and only worth mentioning if it is a right or freedom you can't sign away.
Edit: note that I wrote this from my Euro-centric point of view. Here universities are heavily subsidied and Ph.D. students are employees of the university.
No such license is needed. With enrollment in an educational facility, you sign over all rights on required course work to said facility. It's not your work, as little as work you do as an employee is your work: your employer owns all rights.
That is true of work done in University research labs, but course work, where you are paying to be there, not so much. Especially in undergrad and masters programs where students are less likely to work for the university.
That's not true. In my jurisdiction it is not even possible for a juristic person (i.e. company) to own any copyright whatsoever. Only a physical person can be a copyright owner here. So I do own the copyright of everything I do for my employer and certainly for anything I ever wrote or otherwise created in school.
Then the employee must have granted the employer a complete and exclusive right to use the copyrighted produces. There is not other solution: otherwise you can extort your company by threatening to leave and revoke all their rights to use your work of the past years. Many types of companies are near impossible without exclusive rights to the fruit of their employees' labour.
This is why in for instance The Netherlands, in every contract, an employer will by default demand all the rights related to work you do in your spare time, if it is related to your profession. And this makes complete sense: in the past, there have been problems with people that loved their job, did some work in the evenings for purely job-related stuff, became disgruntled later and successfully sued to the company for infringement.
That's not actually a universal fact. It's not uncommon to have someone publish a work that was initially submitted as an assignment so and there are university's that don't claim the copywrite on the work.
The university has the right to ask you to submit your work however they want as a condition to course completion. If you don't want to submit your work to turnitin you don't have to complete the course. Nobody's forcing you to.
If the extent of your objection is that turnitin robs you of potential financial benefit of selling your work, then that's by design: that's exactly what the educational institution wants to do! It doesn't matter that selling your work to a paper mill is legal. It's against the interests of the institution, so they're not going to let you go through their programme and keep that right.
The university has the right to ask you to submit your work however they want as a condition to course completion. If you don't want to submit your work to turnitin you don't have to complete the course. Nobody's forcing you to.
A thought experiment: in the USA, a minor's assets belong to the parents, right? So, ipso facto, the parent holds the copyright. What if the parent refuses to allow a copy to go to Turnitin?
Further, minors cannot enter into contracts. Would Turnitin's license agreement be a contract, and hence void since one of the parties was a minor?
> If the extent of your objection is that turnitin robs you of potential financial benefit of selling your work, then that's by design: that's exactly what the educational institution wants to do!
I know of no university that explicitly prohibits students from selling papers to paper mills (although I haven't checked). Prohibiting students from using papers from paper mills is a different thing entirely.
Seriously? I am 100% certain that selling papers for other students to use would have violated my university honor code. I would be surprised if there are any schools where that isn't the case.
Aiding cheating is against the honor code, however no one is going to say "sell me your paper so I may turn it in for a grade against the code".
Rather they'd say they want your paper so they can see your thoughts. That's fair because they could get the same effect from merely talking to you about your paper.
Or they'd say that its okay to use outside sources (such as your paper) so long as they cite it. This is also true in many cases.
And if they want your paper so they can "see your thoughts" (and pay you for the privilege!?), what's wrong with that paper also being entered into Turn It In? After all, you surely don't think they were lying about their intentions. Because if you suspect they are lying about their intentions, then aren't you aiding cheating?
Well, actually you are still breaking the honor code even after you're graduated. Though the school would probably have little recourse against you in practice.
At least in my CSE program, you are not allowed to give anyone else the answers in any form. That includes talking about how you solved an assignment and it certainly includes sharing solutions for any purpose.
So then textbook and study guide authors are violating your schools honor code? Just because I took the time to increase the value of my study guide by specializing it for CS101 at UT, doesn't mean that I sold my guide for the express purpose of some idiot getting out of doing the work themselves.
I know I wouldn't risk selling a study guide that had anything in the same ballpark as answers to assignments.
Thanks to a quick google, here's my old student handbook:
"Selling academic assignments. No person shall sell or offer for sale to any person enrolled at the University at Buffalo any academic assignment, or any inappropriate assistance in the preparation, research, or writing of any assignment, which the seller knows, or has reason to believe, is intended for submission in fulfillment of any course or academic program requirement."
eli's comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793351) prompted me to go and explicitly check my university's academic honour code, which does explicitly include language about selling assignments. While I maintain that there's a difference between selling a paper—i.e., your answers to an assignment—and selling the assignment yourself, I also concede that it's a hair-splitting one.
It looks like my understanding of the honour code is therefore definitely false for my university, and, from the evidence, probably for many others. (This is particularly embarrassing because I was part of the group that approved the final version of the code!)
On paper, universities disallow helping others cheat. In reality, it doesn't seem to be enforced.
If the helper student has already passed the class, the professor can't take disciplinary action against them without making a major case about it. It's easy to simply fail the cheating student or give them a zero on the assignment without making a record.
Additionally, if it is brought to a committee, it'd be much harder to prove.
So although it's officially not allowed, there's not much universities are doing to combat the providers.
More information on this unfortunate precedent-setting litigation is available on Turnitin's Wikipedia entry. I was very much dismayed but not entirely surprised by the rulings.
So, when you copy somebody else's work (e.g. a song) for personal enjoyment, it's an outrageous crime; but when you copy a student's essay for profit, it's fair use. You're right, it's not at all surprising.
It's copyright infringement by you, the person who made and sent a copy, not by me who just received it. If you look at the lawsuits, they're all convicted because they uploaded, not because they downloaded.
Has anyone ever been convicted for just downloading MP3s?
Besides, there's obviously a difference between receiving a random essay from a person who claims to own the rights (that's obviously in their TOS), and asking to download an MP3 of some band. In the latter case, the downloader obviously knows the copy is illegal and it can be argued that (s)he's abetting the infringer.
4. Privacy. Submitting a paper to Turnitin makes the student's work vulnerable to a breach of Turnitin's servers. Data breaches have become so common that it is probably more accurate to say when Turnitin's servers are breached rather than if they are breached, the student's work could be made public contrary to their wishes.
I am grateful that my professors did not use Turnitin. Some at my school did, but I simply didn't take their classes. Had one of my professors announced they were using Turnitin, I would have dropped the class.
If you suspect me of cheating, talk to me. Put me to any test you like. Have me write my papers in front of you and defend them in an in-person interview. I don't care, just don't ask me to give my papers to Turnitin, because I won't. I don't like them, I don't agree with what they're doing, and I don't trust their ability to secure their servers. Further, I find the idea offensive that I need to prove my innocence when there is no evidence to indicate my guilt.
It only hurts the monitor makers as much as any other competitor would. Even though they are competing against a competitor with a price of $0, that just means they need to make their product worth its price with extra features or specialization for clients. It only hurts a company that can't compete or improve, and that's a good thing for society.
Suppose I am a first mover, considering making the very first heart monitor, ever. Suppose that doing the research for this is going to cost me a huge pile of money. Suppose further that I know that all of the innovation in my product will be cloned by a competitor 6 months after I ship, who after I have established a design, market and framework for this wonderful innovation, will give away the product for free.
That's got to be good for society, right? I'm sure I'll just go do all that research anyway, because I'm a nice guy. And I certainly won't go off and patent the holy living shit out of each and every aspect of the monitor or anything nasty like that, because that would be bad, and we've already established that cloning products has to be an unalloyed benefit for innovation. Because it's, like, free or open or something.
This is the typical argument favouring patents and more broadly, intellectual property. I'm personally against all form of patentw, and for some severe restriction of copyright and trademarking. You could have a look at the book "against intellectual property" (right wing view :), or "against intellectual monopoly" (different, less liberterian view) they're quite partial but have some compelling arguments.
You're preaching to the choir. I'm not making that argument. I'm making the argument that always opening your source up removes a fairly thick line of defense against straightforward reverse engineering, and makes software patents seem more necessary.
There's always the prospect of reverse engineering, but it's a lot harder to do and there are situations where it seems rather unlikely. In enterprise software, particularly, it seems considerably less likely that a big company will perpetrate hard-core reverse engineering naughtiness when bound by a thicket of NDAs and contracts - why risk it? A quick browse through the opened source code is a rather different beast.
Also however cutting edge your research would be , it is would be most likely built upon on some of the research that is already done in the field. Any clone implementation (free or non-free) make use of the knowledge already is available in the public domain and improve in the direction your product is built on. More novel , innovative is your approach it would be as much harder for any alternative ways (free or non free) to catch up.
What you say doesn't in any way contradict the main point, except your unsubstantiated claim that it's automatically good for society.
Competing against a $0 product (which is essentially subsidized by corporate salaries) is likely to increase the barrier to entry. That will make bootstrapping harder, favoring existing enterprises. This is clearly not an unalloyed benefit to society.
The existence of a reasonable 'free' product may also deter the entrance of multiple competitors who would have advanced the state of the art. Clearly this is bad for society.
I'm not arguing that this always happens, or that free software is inherently bad. I'm arguing against the dogma that free software is always automatically good.
It's a choice with consequences and the dogma is an excuse not to think about them.
The existence of a reasonable 'free' product may also deter the entrance of multiple competitors who would have advanced the state of the art. Clearly this is bad for society.
That's not clear at all. If you can't beat a "good enough" free alternative in the market, that's a signal that society would benefit more if you spent your efforts elsewhere.
I'm arguing against the dogma that free software is always automatically good.
As a first approximation, it pretty much is. Would you care to name specific free software that we'd be better off without?
Gimp. If that didn't exist for free maybe someone would have created a product by now that actually competes with photoshop. Of course I can't prove this, but I'll offer the app store as supporting evidence. Look at all the photo editing software that sprang up as soon there was a place Gimp couldn't get to.
Actually, Stallman is pretty clear in his stance. He doesn't care what kind of monetization scheme you use, but your customers have a right to see the source code. You could ostensibly only give the source out to paying customers.
You might argue "but then the client can take the source and change it and redistribute it", but how is that any different from real life? The fact that you can charge so much for scarce copies of physical goods is a flaw of physical objects, not a flaw of digital objects. The digital world doesn't support the monetization schemes of the physical. Fighting that seems to be a losing battle (see RIAA, MPAA, et. al)
That is not Stallman's stance. His stance is that you must give customers your source code as well as the right to modify and distribute that source code and products derived from that source code without limitation so long as they preserve those rights for others. That's a big difference.
Well, at least until the Steam authentication servers go offline if Valve ever shuts down. While Gabe Newell has been quoted as saying that if that were to happen they would unlock everyone's games, it bugs me that there has been no official offer of such. Until then, people can continue to point at Steam and say "but DRM == evil!"
You do understand that if anything happened to the company he'd be legally prohibited from releasing anti-DRM patches, right? It'd destroy the shareholders' value.
Unless it's in writing as a condition of your purchase, and the code is in escrow somewhere, it ain't happening.
The point though is that these vague promises to unDRM products are probably not permitted even if they thought about it and had the patches ready. And this isn't just a Valve thing, id software said something similar when Quake3 first required an online auth check to play on registered servers.
But considering how much you'd lose if Steam went away I can see why people are nervous of using them versus buying CDs.
Well, it's not a contract. Valve isn't actually obligated to do that. (That said, aren't all contractual obligations up in the air when a company goes bankrupt? Can a company promise anything beyond its bankruptcy?)
Seconded. I understand that SF is the place where all the cool kids play, but it's kind of sad that in this day and age of the internet we're still chained to desks in a particular location.
While the WiiWare SDK is a lot cheaper than previous kits, Ninntendo still has you jump through the hoop of being a registered and licensed developer with a business office and a secure facility to store the development kit/hardware. So while it may open the doors to some smaller studios, it's still generally outside of the reach of most "indie" devs compared to the iphone app store.
Emulators themselves do not constitute copyright infringement. For instance, if I wanted to write my own software to run on a Super Nintendo I can do so and run it on an emulator or build a cartridge and flash it on there to play it on the real system.
The copyright infringement starts when you're making unauthorized copies of the data on game cartridges.
The removed apps infringe the copyright of the emulators they were copied from as they do not adhere to the license terms (non-commercial only for snes9x in snesoid, GPL for Mupen64Plus in n64oid and so on). This isn't about the legality of all emulators, just yongzh's.
"For instance, if I wanted to write my own software to run on a Super Nintendo"
That is not the same thing as writing a Super Nintendo emulator and selling it. I can think of lots of things that could be copyrighted about Super Nintendo's "OS".
Only the the actual implementation code (and subsequent compiled result) is under copyright, anyone is free to write an independent implementation that's not based on any of the original copyrighted code.
(There is of course the possibility of patents covering the innovations in the SNES, but that's a separate issue from copyright, and I have no idea how software patents in Japan worked around the time the SNES got released.)
That's a good point. I believe the patents on the NES Lockout chip expired recently and hence the flood of NES/Famicom hardware clones in recent years.
Copyright is concerned with protecting original works, so it depends on what exactly you're referring to by "API". My interpretation is that the technical document describing an API is an original work and that the library implementing an API is an original work (provided they do not copy or modify existing works protected by copyright, then they are derivative works), but the idea the API conveys is not protected by copyright (this is what's known as the idea-expression divide[1]).
This is further complicated by the fact that we're discussing the law here so we can't assume anything to be logical or consistent. In the US, the DMCA have specific portions concerning the legality of reverse engineering for various purposes, which have implications for someone wishing to write an independent implementation of an API[2]. Maybe someone would argue that any implementation written according to the API specification is a derivative work?
I don't think there's a definitive answer to your question, since AFAIK this haven't been tested in court. In fact, in the ongoing patent/copyright dispute between Oracle and Google, Oracle claims Google violated Oracle's copyright by reproducing Java API's in Android[3].
(Disclaimer: IANAL, and I've probably misinterpreted something along the way)
IIRC, the game on the smartphone was running via a native C++ binary, so it's pretty close to the metal. In a web browser you have layers of abstractions that kill performance.
It's a sad day when we herald slow and buggy modern implementations of game technology that was working just fine in 1985 as the future just because now you don't have to install a program.
While I agree with you, it is interesting to note that ACTA originally started out as an anti-counterfeiting agreement. But then again, counterfeiting currency might still be under different laws from counterfeiting designer jeans.
I'm curious about corporate culture in an American company in Japan. Does that mean that it's not as bad as the salaryman horror stories that we often hear about? Would you say that the corporate culture in the offices is more American or Japanese? I've always wondered how those two styles would interact with each other.
It's a mix of cultures but heavily tilted towards the culture of the headquarters. I think established businesses like Amazon attract people who fit into the culture of the company -- sure, it's an American company, but it's very different from Oracle or Twitter or Morgan Stanley.
1. Turnitin cites fair use ("it's educational"), but one of the metrics of fair use is the extent of use (they use the whole thing), if it's used for profit (they are), and the affect of merchantability. As shady as it sounds, paper mills are not illegal, copyright infringement is. If a paper mill rejects your paper because it's been through turnitin, that hurts me as an author.
2. Another aspect of the monetization that really grinds my gears is that every paper I am forced to submit benefits turnitin by making their database larger and thus helping grant them a monopoly in this market. I am being forced to write articles for the monetary benefit of a company. If they're making money off my paper I want a cut.
3. Turnitin does not offer any way to remove one's documents from their database. If it was merely being used temporarily to compare for plagiarism against internet or book sources then that'd be reasonable. But they keep my papers forever and will continue to monetize them for years after the fact.
I understand the plight of educators that want to stop plagiarism, but forcing me to irrevocably offer royalty-free licenses for my work to a for-profit company that is then charging the school (which if it is public is being funded by my tax dollars) is just insane any way you slice it.
Unfortunately the courts sided with Turnitin on this issue back in 2007 and 2009 and somehow ruled that their for-profit use was fair use.