Follow up on the Student Plagiarism case
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 plagiarism checking site. The gist of the dispute was that submission to the site came with a requirement that permission be granted to archive copies of all papers for use in future plagiarism checks.
Earlier this month, the district court ruled in the case, and the students lost. Thanks to William Patry at The Patry Copyright Blog for a summary of the opinion.
The students lost on two fronts. First, the court ruled that they had entered into valid contracts with the company that allowed the company to do what they did. Second, even without the contracts, the company’s use of the student papers fell within protected fair use.
Fair use usually, but not always, assumes the use of a portion of a written work, not the entire piece, as was the case here. The finding of fair use in this case is based much more heavily on the purpose of the use and the affect on the author’s ability to commercially exploit the work. This is a good sign that actual legal analysis of fair use cases is not entirely dead.
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