Let me say up front, Iıve never used this service. An article in the May
17, 2002, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (Andrea L. Foster,
³Plagiarism Detection Tool Creates Legal Quandary²) indicates that there
some potential legal/ethical issues with the service. Hereıs an excerpt:

Lawyers say the problem with Turnitin.com is that student papers are copied
in their entirety to the services' database, which is a potential
infringement of students' copyrights. (An author doesn't need to file for a
copyright; the law automatically bestows on authors the rights to their
written works.) And the copying is sometimes done without students'
knowledge or consent, which is a potential invasion of their privacy.

Those concerns contributed to the decision by officials at the University of
California at Berkeley not to subscribe to Turnitin.com, says Mike R. Smith,
assistant chancellor for legal affairs: "We take student
intellectual-property rights seriously, and that became one of the trouble
spots for us in moving ahead with this proposal."

Dan
___________
Dan Butcher
Instructor and Webmaster, Dept. of English
University of Alabama at Birmingham
HB207D, 205/934-8578
dbutcher@...
http://www.uab.edu/english/




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