Over student objections, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has found that Web-based plagiarism detection service TurnItIn.com does not violate the students' copyrights in their work, even though it sometimes stores their complete papers for future plagiarism hunting. The federal decision (PDF) reads like a primer on "fair use," which was the legal doctrine that TurnItIn relied upon for its activities.
Several years ago, when I had the distinct privilege of teaching freshman composition, "plagiarism detection" took the form of using Google to look up sentences that seemed suspiciously out of place (and suspiciously well-written). This generated results more often than I could believe, but professors today can turn to Web-based tools like TurnItIn for even quicker searches of whole batches of student papers.
ars technica
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