Friday, March 30, 2007

Turnitin sued by school kids

Some high school children in Arizona have sued Turnitin, a company that charges schools and colleges to check their students papers against a database of "more than 22 million student papers as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals." As papers are checked they are also added to the database, so the company is charging the folks who facilitate the growth of its database.

The students involved are specifying work they produced which included instructions to Turnitin not to add it to their database. The instructions were ignored and the papers added to the database anyway, not surprisingly since the process is basically automated. Sounds to me as though they might have quite a strong case and it will certainly be worth watching.

Thanks to Michael Geist for the link to this one.

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