Plagiarism and Intellectual Property Rights

Everything written since 1978 is copyrighted the moment it is put on paper or saved on disk. Even as I type this, my words are copyrighted. But how do those copyrights apply to work created as part of a school assignment? This is part of a new debate that has grown out of a Fairfax County, Virginia, school system new tactics to combat plagiarism. The school system now submits all student papers to a third-party company that maintains a database of student papers. The students' assignments are then checked against other students' work. The company, called Turnitin, has over 22 million papers in its database. However, as the Washington Post reports, not all students are happy about the idea.

Members of the new Committee for Students' Rights said they do not cheat or condone cheating. But they object to Turnitin's automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights.

The real question is whether the students surrender those copyrights when they turn in the assignments. But at McLean High School in Fairfax County, students refusing to have their papers entered into the database will receive a zero on the assignment. This, along with a "guilty until proven innocent" approach, raise some pseudo-due process issue. And the high school students aren't the only ones worried; the intellectual property caucus of the Conference on College Composition and Communication is debating these issue.

For those of us still in school, plagiarism is a constant issue with which university administrations constantly grapple. Most schools use tactics like honor code pledges and astute grading to prevent cheating, but the many resources available to students on the Internet are presenting new challenges to administrators. I think I might consent to having my work submitted to a database, but the idea of being forced to participate in such a program rankles me a bit.

The issue hasn't reach the stage of litigation in Fairfax, but a recent petition against the database system garnered 1,190 signatures. Sooner or later, school administrators are going to face a legal challenge to such practices and the courts will have to weigh in on the issue. In the meantime, a little honesty continues to go a long way.