May 2007 Archives

So I was catching up on some ITS blogs and I noticed that Jeff Kuhns and I both had an article about the imminent demise of NetRadio with the exact same title. Since his was dated AFTER mine, I can only assume that I need to use TurnItIn.com to see how badly he plagiarized me! *

Seriously, though, TurnItIn.com finds itself in a bit of a legal battle with high school students from McLean VA over copyright assignment and intellectual property.

Let's back up for a moment... TurnItIn.com is a service which educational institutions, including Penn State subscribe to. The idea is that they maintain a database of articles, papers, essays, books etc. which they use to match against papers submitted by customers. By matching words and groups of words, TurnItIn determines whether those phrases, sentences, and concepts are "properly attributed or paraphrased" in the submitted paper. According the a recent article in Time Magazine:

Every day more than 100,000 papers are fed into Turnitin.com a plagiarism-detection site that compares each submission with billions of Web pages, tens of thousands of journals and periodicals and a growing archive of some 40 million student papers. More than 7,000 educational institutions use the system

An institution can use this service one or two ways. An instructor can submit student papers to the service which runs a report on the paper which can presumably detect plagiarism or at least where passages/quotes should be attributed to an existing piece of content in the TurnItIn database. In some situations (including some at Penn State) a student could submit his draft the the service, and use it to address various passages flagged as plagiarism or unattributed quotes. Ideally, the latter method would result in fewer papers "flagged" by the former method. There are some who consider the the first method a "guilty until proven innocent approach."

At Penn State, we have a deal where while we subscribe to the service, we don't let our students' papers get in the mix where they are used for comparison with the masses, i.e. Penn State papers never get put in the general database. I have mixed feelings about this approach. A part of me believes that we are protecting in part our students' work by doing this. Another part of me says that this service relies on collective intelligence -- it only gets better as more content (which can be reused) is added.

Regardless of how one feels on this, there is a group of students from McLean (VA) High School who are trying to hoist Turnitin's parent company iParadigms on its own petard, citing copyright infringement as the reason. To do this, a lawyer helped the students register a copyright on their papers for $45/paper. Since they didn't give their teacher or iParadigms the right to use the intellectual property, they are taking iParadigms to court for what could amount to $150,000 per incident.

While iParadigms thinks the students don't have a case, I'm not so sure (remember IANAL!). The case will in all likelihood go to court this fall. This will get interesting.

* It turns out some guy named MacLean (not to be confused with McLean VA) beat us both to the line, "The Day the Music Died." Jeff -- I think "plagiarized" is maybe too harsh of a word, perhaps "improper attribution" is the right phrase...

NPR ran an "exit interview" with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Friday. It's an interesting interview as his decade long duties as PM draw to a close next month. What strikes me every time I hear Mr. Blair is his eloquence and wit. In my opinion, Tony Blair is a most eloquent practitioner of spoken English. I think the British parliamentary system "selects" for a well spoken, witty leader. Not only does the PM have to represent the country in matters domestic and foreign, but every week that Parliament is sitting, the PM must spend half an hour answering questions from Members of Parliament (MPs) in an exercise known as Prime Minister's Questions. Prime Minister's Questions has become a very popular show on the C-SPAN network. Many parliamentary bodies around the world have copied this convention. It would be interesting to see how our current crop of U.S. presidential candidates would fare in such a system.

I saw the Rev. Falwell died Tuesday afternoon and one of the spires on the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame blew off in a wind storm on Tuesday evening.

Am I Left Behind and just don't know it yet?

Earlier this week the Supreme Court gave new life to the "obviousness test" in U.S. Patent law. In a unanimous decision, the Court ruled the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which handles patent appeals, had not been "a stringent-enough standard to determine whether a patent was infringing."

In a case know as KSR v. Teleflex, the Court ruled that the patent for an adjustable automobile pedal design didn't pass the "obviousness test" -- it was an obvious thing to do combining existing products/concepts. According to some experts, KSR could overturn millions of patents. More importantly, I think it will result in the Patent Office and the courts applying a more stringent "obviousness test" to grants of future patents (and that certainly would be helpful in the IT field).

Professor Gregory Mandel of Albany Law School has a different opinion. He doesn't think the KSR decision is that significant because it doesn't clarify what an "obviousness test" is.

Nevertheless, IP Attorneys, get ready... a million is a lot of patents.