Turnitin.com turns out a profit on our papers

Related Content

Last 3 stories in Editorials

• To eat or not to eat
• Threats to our civil liberties
• Valentine's Day needs more creativity

Other stories that might interest you...

• Threats to our civil liberties
• To eat or not to eat
• God does not belong in schools
• Lower the Drinking Age to 18
• For our sake, please work

Ben Wilson, Webmaster
January 22, 2010
Filed under Editorials

Nearly everyone who has used any online service in the past few years has checked the all-pervasive “I agree” box. Be it Gmail, Facebook, or the Washington Post it has become common place for a user to be required to acquiesce to a license agreement before they are capable of using the service.

Generally speaking, these agreements are harmless; they exist principally to ensure that the service provider cannot get sued for the actions of their users.

However there has been a trend among some service providers to include clauses within their End User License Agreements (EULA) wherein they in fact claim ownership over the content generated by their service.

Facebook is a good example. Whether you realize it or not, Facebook owns a perpetual and limitless license to all of your photos on the site. This is not to say you don’t own them, Facebook does not have an exclusive license, but rather is allowed to do whatsoever it wants with your content.

This is first and foremost to allow them to take it down if it gets them in legal trouble. It also has the added benefit of providing Facebook with plenty of free material that they use for promotional materials.

Ultimately however you have a choice: you can read (or pretend to read) the EULA and click I agree, or you can disagree, and choose to not use their service.

Those doing either a Historical Investigation or their IB Extended Essay have found themselves in an entirely different situation, one wherein there is a EULA that must be accepted, but no real choice exists.

The EULA in question comes from turnitin.com, a plagiarism detection service run by iParadigms, and it gives the service provider a broad set of rights over the intellectual property submitted to it.

“You hereby grant iParadigms a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, irrevocable license to reproduce, transmit, display, disclose, archive and otherwise use in connection with its Services any paper You submit to the Site whether or not originally submitted in connection with a specific class. This license shall survive the termination of the User Agreement. Any cessation of use of the Site shall not result in the termination of any license You grant herein to iParadigms.”

In essence, iParadigms gets to do whatever it wants with the documents from now until the end of the world. Once made, the license is irrevocable.

Now, I am not nearly so conceited as to feel outraged at the misuse of my paper specifically, and I fully concede my utter lack of plans to monetize it in any way shape or form. Nor do I question the motives of iParadigms and their use of the documents in the future.

However, there are two issues present here, the first being the inherent conflict of interest that this system engenders.
iParadigm’s business model is contingent upon not only their ability to compare submitted works to documents and websites available online, but also on the reams of documents that have been submitted through their service.

The ability for turnitin.com to detect plagiarism requires this massive set of documents, and thus its fair to say that they make money by owning the database of submitted works.

Thus, through contracts iParadigms has made with vast numbers of educational organizations, the students using the service are given no choice but to perpetuate iParadigm’s business model.

The second question also comes down to choice. Do we or do we not actually have an option when presented with the “I agree” checkbox?

In the end however, all of this point to brokenness of the current intellectual property framework. On the one hand you have teenagers around the world downloading thousands of songs in what is clearly doing a disservice to the artists.