What would happen if a website had an article that had embedded in it excerpts from copy-writ material that was purposely put there to trigger a lawsuit? I can see this as a method to catch posters who innocently want to use information that should be freely available on the internet. Could this be paving the way for internet booby traps?
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? Oh my! This could get really messy in this corner of the woods where we used to have freedom of speech. Instead, the trial lawyers will have their claws in the internet as their new cash cow to gore until it has been destroyed.
I have said before, the press acts as if they are dogs in a chicken coop rather than the watchdogs for freedom they are supposed to be in this free republic.
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?