I admire the chutzpah of the students mentioned in this Washington Post article:
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.[.]
The article mentions that the four plaintiffs (two at McLean High, and two in Arizona) obtained copyright registrations for their papers, and that at least one of the papers was transmitted with explicit instructions to not be archived.to no avail.
I can empathize with educators seeking ways to combat plagiarism given the havoc Al Gore’s internets have wrought. However, the students have a point as well, that they’re both assumed to be cheaters, and then they have a commercial entity making money in part off the efforts of their labors.
This sounds like a stunt I would have loved to pull in high school.