Turnitin and hold your nose March 27, 2008
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Copyright Issues and Legislation, Fair Use, Technologies , 1 comment so farI have been very neglectful of posting for the past two weeks, mostly due to the pressures of other work, but the attention paid to the recent court decision involving the online plagiarism detection service Turnitin has finally provoke me enough.
Turnitin is a web-based service that compares submitted papers to vast database of essays available on the web and it is own proprietary database. It offers instructors a report on how likely it is that the given paper is plagiarized. Four high school students from
One aspect of the decision worth mentioning is its discussion of the claim that Turnitin infringes copyright because it adds a copy of every paper to its database as soon as the paper is submitted so it can be compared to later submissions. The plaintiffs tried to prevent this by indicating their lack of consent to have their work copied in this way on the papers they submitted, but the court found that the click-through contract they were obligated to agree to in order to submit in the first place took precedence. More on that in a moment. On the copyright issue, the court found that the company had a valid fair use defense regarding their storage and use of student work, even if the contract giving them permission had failed (which it did not).
I have been torn about the fair use analysis the court used in this case. I have a hard time justifying to myself the business model Turnitin use, although my doubts are likely bound up with broader concerns about this kind of attempt to use technology to force people to behave with integrity. But, to my mind, Turnitin’s business model is as dependant on infringement as is Grokster. The district court disagreed, finding that Turnitin made a transformative use of the works it archived for later comparision. What strikes me most about this decision is the way “transformative use” has become a talisman, invoked whenever the court wants to find fair use. The copyright statute seems to indicate pretty clearly that even non-transformative uses can be fair use, but courts are now so enamored with the notion of transformation that they are now finding it even in unlikely situations because it has become the sine qua non of fair use. This is both good and bad for higher education; some educational uses of copyrighted works seem to be purely iterative, not transformative, and fair use in those cases seems increasingly hard to argue. On the other, the more the concept of transformative use is expanded, the better it will be for educational; some of those uses that don’t seem transformative to me may well seem so to our courts.
The other, more troubling aspect of the Turnitin decision was the court’s attitude to the click-wrap license. The plaintiff students had no choice but to click through the license; they faced a zero if they didn’t and there was no way to communicate with Turnitin until they had accepted the license. Nevertheless, they tried to make their objection to the term that allowed Turnitin to copy and save their work as soon as possible; they included a notice with their paper that said they did not consent. Tough luck, said the court; you agreed to the license and you have to live with it. This strict enforcement of a “take it or leave it” license even when the party on whom it is imposed objects in a timely way seems to make a mockery of the notion of a contract as a bargain that may be “unconscionable” if there is no meaningful chance to negotiate.
If we need further confirmation that the court was aiming at a particular result and disregarding a reasoned discuss of the law, there was its astonishing dismissal of the plaintiff’s argument that, as minors, contracts they entered into are voidable. The court recognized that this was the usual rule in contract law, but said that the plaintiffs could not avail themselves of it because they had accepted the “benefits” of the contract. What benefit had they accepted, I wondered. Standing to sue, the court replied, the right to bring the case to challenge the contract itself. By this logic, of course, no contract could ever be challenged on the basis of “infancy.” Such absurd and circular reasoning can only serve, as Bill Patry says, to increase the cynicism so many people feel toward our courts.
Copyright reform suggestions, part 1 February 12, 2008
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Copyright Information Notes, Copyright Issues and Legislation, Technologies , add a commentI am a little ashamed to admit that, at the American Library Association meeting last month, I learned about a very problematic provision of the
For some odd reason, Congress crafted an exception for sound recordings that were made prior to February 15, 1972. Those recordings, instead of being subject to the normal copyright rules, continue to be protected by state law until 2067. State protection, which was usually created by judges rather than legislators, often allowed perpetual protection for unpublished works, but were not designed to deal with other materials. Leaving these historical sound recordings subject to the patchwork of state laws has meant that, in fact if not by intent, these historical materials are subject to the most restrictive of state laws and for all practical purposes unusable until 2067. For the earliest recordings, which date from the 1890s, this amounts to a copyright term of over 170 years. Since even preservationists are reluctant to make copies under this bizarre and uncertain regime, many recordings are locked up by copyright for longer that the usable life of the medium in which they are recorded; they will be irretrievably lost before they are available in the public domain.
So here is an opportunity to reform our copyright act to mitigate one of its most pernicious effects – the unnecessary loss of our cultural heritage merely to time and decay – without harming anyone’s economic interests. In fact, compilations of some of these old recordings that are available for sale in other countries but technically infringing in the
But it is just so easy! January 11, 2008
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Copyright Issues and Legislation, Technologies , 1 comment so farThe ease with which we can copy and use stuff found on the Internet, particularly photographs and other images, leads to some delicious ironies when some of the major corporate interests that rail against file-sharing are caught infringing other peoples’ copyrights. The Washington Post published an interesting story on Wednesday that looked at some of these cases where snapshots on the Web were misappropriated for commercial use. Often the unauthorized use is dismissed as accidental — it is amazing how many unsupervised interns appear to doing significant work for these companies — but whether they are the result of inattention or conscious laziness, these lapses suggest that some of the major commercial content owners have little concern for copyrights not their own property. Makes all the rhetoric about theft and the moral claims of creators that is thrown around by these big media companies seem rather disingenuous.
The best thing about this article, however, is the discussion of it, with the wonderful title “Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal” on the Info/Law blog. I don’t think I have the chance to point to Info/Law before, but it is an excellent place for information and analysis about the “convergence of intellectual property doctrine, communications regulation, First Amendment norms, and new technology.” This post, which also reports on a recent infringement action filed against Jerry Seinfeld and his wife, is an nice example of a careful yet entertaining dissection of the legal principles at stake in each of the two reported stories.
The point, of course, is that the Internet has fostered a culture of easy borrowing and creative remixing that is at odds with much of our current law. There is a great deal in that culture that is valuable, with its emphasis on user creativity and sharing, and its conflict with much of the prevailing rhetoric about intellectual property is becoming too obvious, and too ubiquitous, to ignore.
Still waiting January 7, 2008
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Digital Rights Management, Technologies , 1 comment so farIt seems we have been waiting for years for the e-book to “arrive.” The promise of having a whole library in a hand-held device has been made for a long time, but the technology has seldom lived up to expectation. The early readers were awkward to use and difficult to read. The latest generation of e-book readers seems to have improved a great deal, but problems still remain.
The same concern about DRM in e-books is also raised on a recent post on the if:book blog from the folks at the Institute for the Future of the Book. “The future of the sustainable book” is part of a much larger discussion, all of which is worth attention. Regarding all sorts of electronic texts, this telling remark clearly places DRM protected proprietary e-books low on the scale of sustainability: “since I work in book publishing, job one is to figure out what it means to create a sustainable book. Lots of models come to mind. Good ones like Wikipedia (device-neutral and always in the latest, free, edition) and bad ones like the Kindle, (which tries to create a market for an ebook reader with designed obsolescence).”
Today a e-mail appeared in my inbox that proclaimed that the era of DRM is over. The author was referring to a recent announcement by Sony BMG that they were finally considering following the lead of much of the rest of the music industry and selling music in an open MP3 format. This is good news, but it is not the end of DRM by any means. Many other issues regarding electronic protection measures remain, and we are still waiting for a truly usable, portable e-book and reader.
P2P and New Business Models November 14, 2007
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Copyright Issues and Legislation, Digital Rights Management, Technologies , add a commentPeer-to-peer file sharing is usually not a scholarly communications issue in itself. Most such activity involves the infringing reproduction and distribution of music and video files, and it is more of a problem for colleges and universities than a benefit. Nevertheless, there are legitimate forms of file-sharing that happen at universities (and between them), and the big danger that recreational file swapping poses to schools is that draconian measures to control the illegal activity will also inhibit legal and productive collaboration.
The problem posed by illicit file-sharing will not be solved by increased enforcement measures; the genie is already out of the bottle in that regard — P2P swapping has grown beyond the bounds of any attempt to stop it using either law or technology. What are needed to curb the growth of P2P are business models that make legal acquisition of digital music and movies more attractive than the illegal alternatives. Georgia Harper from the
