[StayAt HomeMother]

Who else is going to be hit with copy write infringement. Would they come after my son who thought it might be easier to throw in a paragraph on his term paper that was word for word from a internet site? How many of us have done that? Would they start writing laws that required teachers to turn in students they found had used copy writ material?

This process has already started. Our local public high school requires students to run major term papers though turnitin.com, which specializes in "online plagiarism prevention."

To excerpt from its web site (yes, in less than 100 words!): "

Any text in the paper that is found by our system to be unoriginal appears underlined, color-coded, and linked to its original source. All work submitted to Turnitin is checked against three databases of content:

1. Both a current and extensively archived copy of the publicly accessible Internet (more than 4.5 billion pages updated at a rate of 40 million pages per day);

2. Millions of published works, including the ProQuest commercial database, ABI/Inform, Periodical Abstracts, Business Dateline, and tens of thousands of electronic books including ... Literary Classics;

3. Millions of student papers already submitted to Turnitin."

A copy of the analysis from this site must be turned in with the term paper.

That third database really annoys me. My children are FORCED to GIVE a copy of their own, original work to this company so that future submissions can be matched against what my children have written. It is rather chilling to have the immature ramblings of teenagers be archived like this! Will their words be held against them forty years from now?

[Born Conservative]

Post #402 may be of interest to those on the list. 

The public school plagiarism Nazis are hard at work.

[Robert_Paulson2]

Will their words be held against them forty years from now?

---

yes.
but not that long from now.
try next five or ten... to be more accurate.

[jonrick46]

We are using copyright laws written for the age of the Royal typewriter and applying them to the modern internet. WE have not reformed these laws to conform with the information age in a fair and equitable manner. This is the stuff that we the people must change. I do not know how the battle should start, but I am absolutely shocked that a monster has been allowed to sneak into the room to devour us.

[Joy Angela]

RE: High schools and colleges using the internet to archive
all student termpapers and reports in the name of "plagiarism"

I'd like to see a copy of Hillary Rodham Clinton's
college thesis, by the way.

I wonder if http://www.turnitin.com can get us a copy.