Turnitin, which currently processes over 40 million papers per year, has a unique birds-eye view of the situation and its statistics, though somewhat limited in their application, are interesting and may be useful to at least some degree.

It is important to note, as Turnitin does, that they do not actually detect plagiarism and instead, only track copied content. It is up to a human to determine what is plagiarism and what is legitimately cited. Still, it’s clear from this report that many of the sources are plagiarisms as there is almost no reason or opportunity to use them legitimately in an academic environment.

Also, it’s worth noting that the study only looks at content copied from the Web and makes no mention of Turnitin’s other databases, including the ones it has of submitted papers and various academic journals that are not online.

So what did the study find? The results were interesting, but perhaps not very surprising

How the Study Was Performed

The study looked at some 33.5 million papers (including some 9 million secondary papers and nearly 24.5 million higher education paper) that were submitted between June 2010 and June 2011. In those papers, it found a total of 128 million content matches, just shy of an average of 4 matches per paper (Reminder: Matches are not necessarily plagiarisms, just verbatim copies, and they can be almost any length from very short to almost the whole paper.)

The study then traced those matches back to their sources. Those sources were then categorized into six categories, Social Networking/Content Sharing, Homework/Academic, Cheat Sites/Paper Mills, News Sites/Portals, Encyclopedias and “Others”.

The results were then tallied, along with information about which sites were the most popular, and were compiled into the infographic below.

What the Study Found

To be honest, there weren’t many surprises in the study. The top site, predictably, was Wikipedia, with 8% of all secondary and nearly 11% of all higher education matches coming from that one site. Yahoo! Answers was second in both lists, with nearly 8% of secondary matches and nearly 4% of all higher education matches.

In fact, of the top ten sites, 8 were found on both (Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, eNotes, Slideshare, Scribd, Oppapers and Amazon all being in the top ten on both lists). Secondary papers also turned to Essaymania and 123HelpMe, where high education students turned more toward CourseHero and Justanswers.

Since many schools have expressly banned the use of Wikipedia for academic research, at least as a source, it seems likely that many, if not most, of those copies are plagiarized. The same holds true for Yahoo! Answers as it is not a site one would normally use as a source in an academic paper.

One thing that was striking was that higher education students seemed to use a wider variety of sources, pulling more from news and portal sites, as well as from cheat sites and paper mills, than those in secondary schools. However, secondary students pulled three times as much from “other” sites, which included many review sites that were popular.

My Take

Personally, I didn’t find a great deal surprising about this study as it matched up well with what I’ve heard anecdotally talking with teachers and others in the industry. The biggest surprise was to see that higher education students are MORE dependent on Wikipedia than their secondary school peers, but they also showed a greater overall variety in the types of sources they copied from.

I likely would have guessed Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers on my own as 1 and 2, but I was also a bit surprised to see Amazon, Slideshare and Answers.com ranking as high as they did.

As for the data itself, to me it shows that students, by in large, are not being very creative about where they get their content from. The top 10 sites account for 31% of all matches on secondary students and over 35% of all matches for higher education students. All of the sites involved are heavily indexed and easily searched for in Google, meaning that, while Turnitin can help find matches and makes it easier to do so, at least when dealing with the Web matches teachers relying on Google are likely doing fairly well too.

(Reminder: The study did not look at matches on Turnitin’s internal database and archive, just the service’s archive of the Web.)

Still, the study does show that students are pulling content from a variety of sources, including many flagrantly illegitimate ones such as essay mills and cheating sites. As such, this study hammers home the importance of dealing with plagiarism proactively, something that the report strongly suggests.

Bottom Line

All in all, the study shows what types of sites that teachers should be expecting to find their students copied from, both legitimately and when plagiarizing. Of course, every classroom is going to be different, but this 10,000 ft view of content use can provide at least some information useful to those “in the trenches”.

Though I don’t think many educators will be surprised by these results, they are still interesting and still useful, making them something every educator should be aware of, especially as copying content from the Web becomes more and more common.

The Infographic

Click to enlarge

WriteCheck is a service that lets students submit a paper and have it checked for grammar and plagiarism. While there are many such services, this one is powered by iParadigms, the company that makes Turnitin, the most popular plagiarism checker for academic institutions.

This caused many to feel that iParadigms was, as one instructor put it, “warlords who are arming both sides in this plagiarism war.”

But while I can certainly understand this feeling of betrayal and this concern that students might use WriteCheck for the purpose of skirting plagiarism detection systems, perhaps using it to vet a purchased paper or to make sure their efforts to hide plagiarism were adequate, it is a misguided fear.

However, this is a fear that stems from faulty logic when it comes to fighting plagiarism and, sadly, the logic seems to be getting more pervasive as time goes on.

I’ve already talked at length about how schools are hurting the fight against plagiarism, but, as this WriteCheck controversy proves, schools have yet to really understand the issues involved and what they need to do to keep students from plagiarizing.

Stopping the War

As I mentioned in the previous article, there’s a pervasive climate of fear when it comes to matters of plagiarism. Students are threatened with severe punishments over an act that is often poorly explained and seemingly decided by a computer that they never see. Even honest students can be afraid of getting caught plagiarizing and that, in turn, does no good for the academic climate.

But as the “warlord” comment points out, many instructors feel that they are at war against plagiarists and that iParadigms and similar companies arms dealers of sorts. This turns catching a plagiarist into a victory and one escaping a defeat, an attitude that doesn’t bring about any progress or understanding.

The truth is that every plagiarist caught by Turnitin or a similar automated checker is a failure of the system and a miserable one at that.

Yes, that line of defense is necessary and it should be there, but it is the absolute last resort and, despite the impressive technology, the least effective as well.

Consider the many opportunities to stop a plagiarist BEFORE they are caught by an automated detection system:

1. Education: Educating students about what is and is not plagiarism, from a practical standpoint, is important for helping them avoid accidentally plagiarizing and understanding why it is important not to do so deliberately.
2. Assignment Building: A well-crafted assignment is virtually plagiarism proof. Building good assignments that are original, test the student’s knowledge and can’t be trivially copy/pasted is a huge step forward in the fight.
3. Academic Resources: Schools need to make academic resources available, such as assignment assistance programs, to their students where they can ask questions and get help as a means to dissuade plagiarism and eencourage a useful conversation on the topic.
4. Instructor Connection: Though not always practical, in many classes an instructor should know their student reasonably well and be able to detect when they are struggling, enabling them to reach out to them and provide greater help.
5. Instructor Intuition: Once again, if an instructor is familiar with a student’s writing, they should be able to detect plagiarism without having to run it through an automated system.

In short, with so many ways to stop or detect plagiarism BEFORE it reaches an automated checker, every case that gets that far has to be seen as a failure, a breakdown in the chain before that point.

Granted, some of these shortfalls have more to do with the education system at large, which often puts far too many students into a class, dividing up instructor attention too many ways.

However, others are more case specific, calling on the schools and instructors to think about plagiarism in a different way and shift their focus from “winning the war” to actually educating and dealing with the issue.

Moving Forward

The simple truth is, the developers of plagiarism detection system, iParadigms in particular, never intended themselves to be the plagiarism police. Obviously, that is going to be part of their function but such tools hold a great deal of potential to make students better researchers, something that WriteCheck can also do.

While there will always be hardcore cheaters who will “write” papers via copy/paste in hopes of getting a good grade or just get out of an assignment, they still are far outnumbered by the legitimate students caught up in the climate of fear.

However, it’s that climate of fear that may actually be encouraging plagiarism. Since many students feel they can’t control if they will or will not be accused of plagiarism, they feel they might as well be a plagiarist.

Warped logic, to be certain, but further proof of how relying so heavily on the last line of defense can actually make the plagiarism problem much worse.

The way forward is to end the war on plagiarism, open up a dialog about it and focus the punitive efforts solely on the hardcore cheaters.

This approach much better serves the bulk of the students and limits the “arms race” discussion that’s taking place now.

Bottom Line

Will this shift in attitude be easy? No. Teachers are angry. They feel a lot of their students are trying to cheat their way to better grades both by lying to them and stepping over honest students who worked hard.

This anger is understandable, but it’s rare that good policy comes from an emotional response.

If schools and instructors look at plagiarism as a practical problem, the issue becomes much more clear. Over-reliance on plagiarism checking technology isn’t solving the problem, but creating a climate of fear and producing smarter plagiarists.

In short, WriteCheck isn’t the enemy, but the hatred of it is a symptom of a much greater problem and one that has to be addressed now lest the situation go completely out of control.

What do you call someone who not only sues someone trying to help them, but does so with terminally flawed legal arguments? An idiot.

There’s really no “nice” way to say it. Using the courtroom as a club against people trying to help you is just plain stupid, even if you have a disagreement with them.

However, that is exactly what children’s book author Elaine Scott is doing to document-sharing site Scribd, suing them for trying to help her better protect her work.

It is a strange and bizarre case not only tests the limits of one’s imagination, but also one that bears a closer examination as it may have an impact on the rights of smaller content creators everywhere.

Background

The case began when Scott found one of her earlier books, financial advice work entitled “Stocks and Bonds, Profits and Losses”, available illegally on Scribd. She filed a DMCA takedown notice and the work was removed but Scott was not satisfied. She filed suit against Scribd with two different accusations.

First, according to Scott, the site itself is a violation of copyright because it “Shamelessly profits from the stolen copyrighted works of innumerable authors” and the creators “Have built a technology that’s broken barriers to copyright infringement on a global scale and in the process have built one of the largest readerships in the world.”

However, it is the second claim that has become the most attention-grabbing. Scribd employs a “takedown stay down” system that prevents infringing works from being reuploaded to the site and her book, once the notice was filed, was added to that database. Scott now also claims that this copyright filtering service is an infringement and that “Scribd doesn’t have the authority to ‘help’ me with anything…. The filtering system is Scribd’s way of asking for forgiveness, rather than permission.”

What ends up tying this entire lawsuit together into a big ball of copyright strangeness is that Scott is being represented by Kiwi Camara, who became famous in copyright circles for his defense of Jammie Thomas in her retrail, which saw her being found liable for $1.92 million in damages for sharing some 24 songs.

When Ashby Jones at the Wall Street Journal called this case a “head scratcher”, he was being polite. This case is, without a doubt, one of the strangest and most befuddling I’ve ever seen.

Analysis

Legally, the case seems to be a non-starter. On the first complaint, the facts of the case line up very closely with the Universal v. Veoh case where the video sharing site Veoh was sued by Universal for enabling users to publish copyrighted content. However, the court threw out the case in September after finding that Veoh had complied with the DMCA and qualified for its safe harbor protection.

Though the ruling in the Veoh case was very specific to the company itself, the facts largely seem to line up. I can attest that Scribd has always responded swiftly to DMCA notices and its copyright filtering system is a further sign of good faith. Scribd is not a popular site among authors and publishers, but that doesn’t make it illegal.

Given that red flag takedowns are virtually meaningless and useless, it is almost certain the courts will favor Scribd on this case. That is, barring a surprise in discovery that shows Scribd had some unexpected level of knowledge or ignored DMCA notices.

The second argument, the one involving the copyright filtering system, also looks to be equally doomed. If the Scribd copyright filter is anything like every other such filter I’ve seen, it operates on fingerprints and not the work itself (doing otherwise requires exponentially more computing power). As such, the facts of that case mirror closely the Turnitin lawsuit, which iParadigms, the makers of Turnitin, won handily.

Turnitin is a plagiarism checking service commonly used by high schools and colleges to look for matching text in student’s paper. As part of the service, it stores a fingerprint of every essay scanned to match against future works. Four students in Virginia objected to this and sued the company but lost with the judge saying that the use of their work was transformative and a fair use.

Even Camara’s argument that “They are building up a valuable asset that nobody else is going to have by taking work from authors without sharing with them the profits,” falls flat. iParadigms is actively selling access to this database and does so to many thousands of institutions. In short, Camara’s worst fears have already been realized in the iParadigms case and the judge still found it to be a fair use.

Whether you agree with that verdict or not, it is clear that it seems to put the Scribd case in a very bad spot.

To be clear, I am not an attorney but these counter-arguments only took me a minute or two to think up. They are patently obvious, especially considering the Veoh case was thrown out mere days before this suit was filed, and it makes this case look doomed to fail. However, that doesn’t mean it won’t have an impact on the copyright climate.

The Real Problem

Copyright filtering services are for the good of both the hosts that offer them and for copyright holders. Hosts don’t have to spend manpower and time removing works via DMCA that can instead be blocked at the gate and copyright holders don’t have to file notices for the same works over and over again.

Though there are some cases where a copyright holder would not want to be in such a database, for example if they only wanted to stop plagiarized uses, not attributed ones, this wasn’t the case for Scott. Since the only use a fingerprinting system has is matching one work against another, for example plagiarism detection or copyright filtering, pretty much any commercial use Scribd had found for its database would have also been beneficial.

However, Scribd has taken no such steps and expressed no intent to do so. It’s matching database, much like YouTube’s, is proprietary and closely guarded. The mere fact that they could do something doesn’t warrant a preemptive strike, especially when what they are accused of possibly doing was found to be a fair use in another case.

What this case might do, however, is make other companies more skittish about developing “takedown stay down” systems. This would likely be a major blow to the smaller artists who lack the resources to file takedown notices on every single misuse of their work but still license their works in a way where such a system would be practical.

This also might have an impact in discouraging companies from entering into areas where takedown notices might be frequent. Faced with the choice of having to spend the manpower to remove every work subject to takedown notice or being sued for a filtering system, some will likely just walk away. This, in turn, could give rise to more legally dubious sites.

After all, if showing good faith either bankrupts your startup or gets you sued, there isn’t much point in showing it at all. It may be more attractive to move to a country with more relaxed regulations and avoid the problem all together.

In short, by suing the people who tried to help her, she may be hurting every other copyright holder in the world.

Bottom Line

In the end, most copyright experts, including Ben Sheffner and Eric Goldman (who many more reasons why the outlook is bleak for Scott) are skeptical about the suit’s future.

Pretty much all of the recent case history goes against Scott in this matter but, more importantly, logic itself is against her.

Though it is understandable that authors and artists want to protect their work and profit from as many uses of their content as practical, suing a company for infringement when they are trying to prevent your work from being infringed is a classic case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. It makes no sense and will only cause more problems, most of them for other copyright holders.

This case is most likely doomed but the sooner it is thrown out the better. The more fear Scott can sew into the providers who act in good faith, the more room others have to grow.

1: Students Reach Settlement in Turnitin Suit

First off today, iParadigms, the makers of the academic plagiarism checking service Turnitin, have settled their lawsuit with a group of Virginia high school students. The group had sued iParadigms for copyright infringement claiming that their continued use of their submitted papers, which are stored in Turnitin’s database for future matching, constituted an infringement.

However, the district court sided with iParadigms, citing both fair use and contractual issues, namely that the students had agreed to the retention of their papers, albeit that they were under 18 at the time and were under the threat of failure in their class. The appeals court agreed on the fair use issue but sent back to the lower court a complaint by iParadigms that one of the students had gained access to the system illegally.

This settlement puts that issue to rest and forbids either side from taking any further legal action, including the anticipated Supreme Court challenge. However, at least one student involved doesn’t seem to be willing to let this go and is looking for students who had their paper placed into the system without their permission.

Still, for now, this one is over.

2: Oprah faces $1 trillon lawsuit

Next up, in a story that was practically made for CopyrightFail, author Damon Lloyd Goffe has sued Oprah for $1.2 trillion (yes, with a “t”) accusing her of plagiarizing his book “A Tome of Poetry” in her Wen-published work “Pieces of my Soul”.

Goffe accuses Oprah of having sold some 650 million copies of the work at $20 a piece and is seeking profits plus interest on the works sold. Good thing Goffe isn’t seeking statutory damages as those would equal, if the maximum damages were awarded for each alleged copy, $97,500,000,000,000 or 97.5 trillion dollars.

It is worth noting that Goffe is filing the suit Pro Se, meaning he is representing himself in the matter. So it seems highly unlikely this suit will go anywhere. This is especially true considering Goffee does not appear to have registered his book with the Copyright Office, a requirement for jurisdiction in a Federal court.

3: The Best Fair-Use Controversy Ever?

Finally today, because it is Friday, I bring to you one of the most interesting fair use debates in a long time.

The pro-marijuana activist organization NORML is being accused of copyright infringement by now-college professor Lisa Jack, who took a series of photos of now-President Barack Obama when he was a freshman in college. NORML took a photo of Obama smoking a tobacco cigarette and edited the photo to replace a marijuana one and used it in a poster with the slogan “Yes We Cannabis”.

Jack is the one who is upset by the use of the image though NORML is claiming that this is a fair use. The case has not moved to a lawsuit phase but many seem to think it will head that way soon.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

The students, who had had their works archived in the Turnitin database after being submitted for a check by their instructor, claimed that the service violated their copyright by storing their work without permission and using it as part of a for-profit business.

The ruling, embedded below, found that iParadigms had not violated the student’s rights. However, the logic behind the ruling is very interesting and may have implications that go far beyond iParadigms and plagiarism checking software in general.

Reasons For The Ruling

The students, for their part, had two different elements to their complaint.

1. That the contract they signed with iParadigms, which was required as part of taking the course, was invalid.
2. That the use of their work in the database was a violation of their copyright.

The judge, Claude M. Hilton, ruled in favor of iParadigms on both elements and dismissed the case.

In regards to the first element of the claim, the judge ruled that the agreement was valid and that it protected iParadigms from the lawsuit. The license, delivered in the form of a click-wrap, said in part the following:

“In no event shall iParadigms, LLC and/or its suppliers be liable for any direct, indirect, punitive, incidental, special, or consequential damages arising out of or in any way connected with the use of this web site….”

According to the ruling, the students could not escape the license simply because they were minors since they benefited from the agreement. The agreement was not coerced since options were available and, according to the judge, the schools have the right to how to address plagiarism issues. Finally, student attempts to modify the contract by writing disclaimers on their paper did not alter the agreement.

But while Judge Hilton could have easily left the matter there and tossed the suit on those grounds alone, she also decided to offer insight on the fair use argument presented by iParadigms as a defense should the contract argument have failed.

On that matter, the judge said the following:

1. While “iParadigms makes a profit in providing this service to education institutions its use of student works… iParadigms provides a substantial public benefit through the network of educational institutions using Turnitin.�?
2. That iParadigm’s use of the work was “Highly transformative” and similar to the Perfect 10 v. Google case. Thus, there is even less emphasis on the commercial aspect of Turnitin’s service.
3. “It is clear that iParadigms’ use of the Plaintiff’s works has caused no harm to the market value of these works.”
4. “Considering all four factors, the Court finds that the iParadigm’s use of the Plaintiff’s written works constitute fair use.

In short, the court ruled that the use of the essays in the Turnitin database was, very overwhelmingly, fair use and not infringing upon the students’ rights.

Implications for the Rest of Us

Though the ruling is an obvious defeat for the students, what it means for the rest of us is much less clear.

The most important elements of the ruling, namely the contract elements, have a very narrow application in that they are targeted toward students in colleges or universities. However, it does strongly reinforce the validity of click-wrap licenses and remind all of us of the importance of reading the terms of service for a site before we click “I Agree”.

Since the fair use decision relied heavily on well-known and closely-followed rulings, especially Perfect 10 v. Google, there is little new to the decision, especially as it impacts how Web sites interact with search engines and other databases.

However, the one “change” it might bring about is bolstering the legal protection of “private” plagiarism-checkign services. Companies such as Attributor and Blogwerx index the Web but not simply to aid in public searching of the Web, but to help their clients, from whom they profit, detect plagiarism of their work.

While the process is similar to Google, some had worried that the differences between these private search engines and the better-known ones could create issues. However, the fair use analysis in this case strongly favors such services.

Obviously each and every case will be weighed on its own merits, but in the area of fair use and search engines, there is a surprising amount of case law and it is fairly clear where the courts are likely rule, much more so than with more traditional fair use issues.

The good news is that this ruling makes it even more likely we’ll see great plagiarism-fighting services in the coming months and years. On the down side, it does mean that we can expect broader “private” database copying of our work.

But if the ruling is to be taken at face value, that isn’t much to worry about. Even the plaintiffs in the case were unable to show any harm to the market of their work.

It seems unlikely that, if called upon, we could show significant harm either, at least so long as the use of the work exclusive to the purpose of finding matches.

Conclusions

Legally, I think the ruling is very sound. All of the elements of the decision were based on previous legal opinion and were applied fairly. I think the judge in this case showed a great deal of understanding of the complexities of the issue and, though I was hard on iParadigms in my earliest writings on the topic, I feel that this was the appropriate ruling for the law.

However, that being said, there is an emotional response to this. It makes me uneasy that students participating in a public school can be forced to sign contracts, despite being minors, requiring them to surrender their work to be archived in a database for another party’s profit.

Though the ruling talks about choices that the student has, namely home schooling or private schools, and the benefit they obtain from the contract, namely passing the class, it is hard to see how, in practical terms, the students had much of either. They did not choose the school, they not choose to take the class and, for most, private school or home schooling is not a practical option.

As correct as the ruling was, it may be time to re-evaluate the rights a student has in their work within a classroom setting. Though I agree that schools should have the right to decide how to check their students’ work for plagiarism and that the fair use analysis was appropriate by itself, it seems to me that elements of this ruling might have implications that go far beyond just plagiarism checking software.

When courts can rule students have “choice” in required classes in a public school and gain “benefit” by simply allowing them to pass, they can push students to do many other things than agree to a clickwrap license. I find that worrisome.

It was the right ruling for the case, I just hope it does not have unintended consequences.

However, I would be very interested in hearing other’s thoughts about this.

Further Reading

iParadigms Earlier Press Release
©ollectenea’s Article

It was a slower week last week in copyright news but there was still plenty going on including a wide array of news from the EU, several new lawsuits and more than a few updates to old ones.

So, as always I sat down with Chris Matthieu from Numly to discuss those stories and more with our usual mix of news, views and abuse.

This week’s stories include.

• UK File Sharers Face Bans from ISPs
• EU Looks to Copyright Reform
• Business Software Alliance Settles Two Lawsuits
• iParadigms Lawsuit to be Dismissed
• Web Sheriff Recruits The Village People to Target The Pirate Bay
• And Many more…

You can download the MP3 file here (direct download). Those interested in subscribing to the show can do so via this feed.

Show Notes

[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/plagiarismtoday/copyright20eps46.mp3]

The service, which was recently accused by iParadigms of illegally using their Turnitin service to generate their results, has decided to shut down and sell off all assets according to an email from iPlagiarismCheck employee Susan Keisler.

Kiesler goes on to say that “such a travesty (criminal and/or copyright) will never take place in the future” and that she “was made an un-witting party to the whole scenario.”

According to Kiesler, she was hired on simply to answer emails and forward on reports. She says it was another person, identified only as “Ms. Nevarez” in the letter, was responsible for the workings of the company and that Navarez has already sold the company to someone wanting to drive traffic to a “separate concern”.

Currently, the iPlagiarismCheck Website is still active. However, I have not tested to see if I can submit a paper for analysis. All in all though, this letter seems to not only verify the accusations of iPagadigms, but also spell the ending for the budget service.

Whether another service will rise up in order to fill that void legitimately remains to be seen. However, the interest and traffic that iPlagiarismCheck attracted indicated that there is indeed a market for this kind of service. It is just a terrible waste that this service had to be, in a word, a plagiarist.

My congrats and thanks goes to Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff for both bringing the matter to everyone’s attention and for helping push this too a quick resolution. I look forward to working with her in future projects.