March 25, 2008

Turnitin.com Wins Copyright Suit
A federal judge in Virginia has dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by high school students over the use of the students' written works in the Turnitin.com plagiarism detection service. The case was defended (and dismissed) on the merits of Turnitin's contract terms, but, notably, the company had also made a secondary, fair use defense, which U.S. District Judge Claude M. Hilton found compelling. Hilton acknowledged that while iParadigms, creators of Turnitin.com, copied papers and created an archive that made "a profit providing this service to educational institutions," its use of the works it copied and archived were sufficiently transformative, and thus protected under fair use.
The case began roughly a year ago, after high school students in McLean, VA, filed a suit charging that the Turnitin.com service is partly based on a violation of copyright law. The software operates by archiving submitted papers, then crosschecking submissions against its archive for similarities that could indicate plagiarism. The students charged that without permission, that archiving constitutes unauthorized copying. They sought as much as $900,000 in damages.
University of Texas scholarly communications advisor Georgia Harper, said that the Turnitin.com verdict, and others, are beginning to shed more light on how courts are viewing fair use claims-and the news is encouraging-especially for Google. "We now have a very nice representation among the circuits (9th, 2nd, 4th) of recent fair use analyses that find that massive copying and using in their entirety, even creative works, for new commercial uses that provide significant public benefit, is a fair use 1) when there is no or only speculative market harm to the market for the original (all of the Google search cases so far)," Harper blogged. She said it is starting to look good for fair use in the digital age-at least in the lower courts. "The lower courts are doing what Congress seems incapable of doing-ratcheting down instead of up."

From www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6544790.html?nid=2673#news1 25 March 2008