Intellectual Property Law

Fair Use Bolstered by Student-Cheating Detection Service

By Ryan Singel, Kevin Poulsen, Sarah Lai Stirland, Kim Zetter, and David Kravets

A federal appeals court granted a boost to fair use advocates Friday when it ruled that an online cheating-detection service storing thousands of student essays did not violate the intellectual property rights of the essayists.

Students who claimed Turnitin.com breached their copyrights because it placed their works in its database brought the lawsuit. The site compares new essays submitted by teachers with a database of other essays to determine whether plagiarism was at work.

The E-Commerce and Tech Law Blog eloquently provides the nuts and bolts of the decision by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals:

The court stepped through the fair use analysis, dropping positive notes here (commercial uses can be fair uses), here (a use can be transformative 'in function or purpose without altering or actually adding to the original work,' citing Perfect 10 Inc. v. Amazon.com Inc.), and here (fact that turnitin.com used the entirety of the plaintiff's work did not preclude finding of fair use). And it turned back a lot of other, small-bore challenges to the district court's fair use finding.

Some 6,000 educational institutions in about 90 countries use the California-based cheating-detection service.

According to the lawsuit, which was rejected by the federal trial courts as well, Arizona and West Virginia students claimed they copyrighted their classroom essays, one entitled "What Lies Beyond the Horizon," and demanded that their papers not be archived in the cheat-detection system.

Still, the decision (.pdf) left open a countersuit for monetary damages by the defendant, iParadigms, which owns the internet site in question. That issue concerns the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same federal statute that was used to criminally convict Lori Drew last year in the infamous MySpace trial.

The countersuit was spawned by allegations that one of the plaintiffs in the case used a password found on the internet to submit papers to a university in classes he was not enrolled in. The appeals court said the alleged fraud cost unnecessary and numerous "manpower hours" investigating what was originally believed to be a technical glitch. In the MySpace case, a Los Angeles federal jury convicted Drew of similar allegations that prosecutors said led to the suicide of a young girl.

See Also:

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• Federal Judge Throws Out Gag Order Against Boston Students in ...
• Five IRS Employees Charged With Snooping on Tax Returns
• MySpace Lawsuit: Rogue Affiliate, Not Former Spammer, At Work ...

Full post as published by Threat Level on April 17, 2009 (boomark / email).