Archiving in the Computer World
Google isn’t the only one wading through questions over archiving. The Washington Post reports today a fascinating story about a lawsuit filed by a number of high school students against an online company that archives student papers in order to check for plagiarizing.
The issue as reported by the paper comes down to this: a copy of the paper is submitted to them to check against their database, but they then keep a copy of the paper and add it to the database so that future papers can be checked against it. The students say that’s an infringement of their rights, unless they agree to let the paper be placed in the archive.
Here’s the way I see the analysis on this:
A student writes a paper and owns the copyright (the copyrights of minors may be owned by the parents, but we’ll keep it simple here and refer to the student owning the copyright).
The paper is handed in to the teacher, who has not been given any rights to use or reproduce the paper.
The teacher sends the paper to the online plagiarization checking company.
So far, so good. The paper is in teacher’s possession, she’s merely given it to someone else to read.
The company runs a check of the paper against it’s database. Fine again.
The company then keeps a copy and places it in the database owned by that company.
Now here, the company needs permission from someone. The teacher doesn’t own the copyright, and so can’t give permission to place the paper in the database, even though the teacher may have been perfectly okay in submitting the paper for the cheat check.
The company would have to have permission from the student who wrote the paper (or parents) to archive it. Since the teacher submitted the paper, the teacher would have to have a permission from the student that she could show the company.
But teacher won’t be able to condition submission of the paper and receipt of a grade on the receipt of permission to give away the paper. A public school can’t do that - although a private school might be able to.
May 1st, 2007 at 11:11 am
[...] Plagiarism Checking Websites May 1st, 2007 by Pamela Parker Last month a group of high school students filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against a compnay that archives student papers for purposes of plagiarism checking. I wrote about it here. [...]
April 1st, 2008 at 4:40 pm
[...] on the Student Plagiarism case by Pamela Parker Last year - actually, almost exactly a year ago - I wrote about a lawsuit filed by several students over a school requirement that all papers be submitted to a web-based [...]