Intellectual Property and the Site Crawl
January 30, 2005
“Anvil and Sprocket”:http://www.anvilandsprocket.com/ was recently crawled by the “TurnItInBot”:http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html. This is a bot that, without fanfare, copies the content of your site and stores it in a database. There, it is used to match against copies of student papers to help catch plagarised papers.
I’ve asked them to stop. For one thing I’m suspicious of such systems anyway, and I’m a little bothered by a company making more money off of it than I am and not even asking first. Search Engines are different — I get some benefit back. But this… I don’t know. What do you think about this?
Posted in Diary
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January 30th, 2005 at 11:10 am
Interesting. A bot that makes a copy of copyrighted material without permission in order to punish students who do the same. There’s some kind of irony in that, I think.
January 31st, 2005 at 6:49 am
The money issue aside, if it is indeed used only to help catch plagiarized papers, then I personally have no problem with it. In fact, I’d even ask to have my site crawled!
However, they’re making money off of your work. Making money off of copyrighted material is, I believe, a copyright infringement. ;)
I wonder what the courts would have to say about this? Want to launch a class action suit?!? Come on — it’ll be fun!
February 1st, 2005 at 4:26 pm
What’s even more insidious is that TurnItIn archives every single paper it receives. Millions of students submit their work via their software, and everything ends up in the archives so it can be used as the basis for further comparisons.
Thus, I feel that TurnItIn infringes copyrights on a number of levels.
February 2nd, 2005 at 5:35 pm
Speaking as a college professor, I find turnitin.com extremely valuable and it allows me to catch cheaters every semester.
February 2nd, 2005 at 6:48 pm
Let’s just hope the cheaters don’t come across that database. Or learn which professors don’t use the service.
The fact remains, they shouldn’t be archiving without permission (much less be making money off of) material copyrighted by someone else.
And if they discover a student does copy from my website (why?!), do I at least get told?
February 2nd, 2005 at 6:59 pm
Of course, anyone who tells you that plagarism is wrong clearly isn’t paying attention:
http://generik.blogspot.com/2005/02/plagiarist-in-chief.html
February 4th, 2005 at 7:33 am
I admit that there’s something kind of big-brotherish about this that I don’t like. But, the thought of some party-animal twerp copying Anvil & Sprocket content for a paper for the 100-level intro to film class he’s barely passing makes me even more annoyed so I tend to side with the teachers here.
If anything, my concern is about how big of a moneymaker this is for the company – it does seem to be a legal gray area, and I’ve gotten the impression in the past that many services for teachers, including those that gather up materials and aids – are ludicrously expensive for what the teachers get (in the case of public schools, what the taxpayers get).
I bet a Google search on a few of the more distinctive exact phrases from a questionable paper would often find the source. We had a case on a message board of someone copying content wholesale from other websites and passing it off as his own, and it was dead easy to find his sources this way. Free.
July 16th, 2005 at 9:18 am
I think their service is useless because if one suspects plagiarism he can do a simple google search and not hire someone to crawl all the web. Considering also that crawling the web is bandwidth expensive and violates copyright I consider it at least ironic if not prosecutable!!!