Why I do not support TurnItIn
There have been some articles recently about a service called TurnItIn which
is marketed at Universities and aimed at cutting down on unattributed
copyright violations. Here at Radioactive Networks we are actively working
against the TurnItIn service wherever we can. This page will describe some
of the reasons.
Copyright Ownership
On their pages, TurnItIn talk a lot about not copying work without the
permission of the Author. They give very little ackowledgement that they do
not own the copyright on the documents that they have indexed on the
Internet.
I love to post to mailing lists. I also run my own WWW site for my business
and contribute articles to magazines. I maintain the copyright on all these
items. I have given permission for people to come to my WWW site to have a
look at these pages by the fact that they are publically available. But I
have not given express permission for companies to come to my WWW site to
store a copy of the site in their database.
I know google and other search engines do this. I have no problem with them,
as in general they are not charging their users for access to my work, and
are not chraging their clients to compare other documents against my work.
TurnItIn did not ask me if they could index my WWW site, they just did
it.
The only way I found out was through examining the logs. Sure, as soon as I
found it, I put a specific ROBOTS.TXT rule to stop them accessing my WWW
site, and they have removed all the pages they stored once I sent them a
DMCA 'Cease and Desist' letter - but I should not have to do that. If they
want to store documentation that I have written, then they need to ack my
express permission.
And it is not as if I do not claim copyright on my pages. EVERY page on my
site has a META tag listing copyright, as well as a message at the bottom of
each page listing 'Copyright', the circled 'C' and the date of the
copyright - as well as my email address. On every page.
The only time I have ever heard from them was when I requested they remove
the stored files, which they say that they did. Why should I have to search
their database to know that they have stolen my work?
My Other Copyright Works
Protecting my own WWW site is easy. What about protecting all the posts I
have made in the past to mailing lists, that are now on WWW pages? What
about the pages that are mirroring (with my permission) my thesis? What
about the articles I have written for magazines where I have retained all
electronic rights?
A quick search of Google.com revealed at least 500 different pages that are
likely to contain references to me - and that was just searching on my Ham
Radio callsign, and not my name. Once you include my name the number is much
higher. How do I protect all these pages from someone who is copying them
with no reguard to my copyright?
Ah, but they are in the public domain I hear you say. You would be wrong.
The only way for a work to enter the public domain is for it to loose all
copyright protection - and as an Author I cannot renounce my copyright
claim. I can offer an unlimited licence to the work for free, or assign it
to another party, but I cannot place it in the public domain. The only way
for it to enter the public domain is for me to die, and to be dead for 50
years [Since I am an Australian citizen].
Therefore TurnItIn cannot claim that my postings are in the public domain. I
retain the copyright. What about Webzines? A compilation copyright is owned
by the author, and he may have no objection to the work being archived by
TurnItIn. But does that author have any right to allow TurnItIn to archive
any work that I have produced? I dont think so.
Where Does This Leave TurnItIn?
So where does this leave TurnItIn. They are in an interesting legal
situation since they are not only storing copies of works without
permission, they are then using these works to produce an income. That would
seem to be a violation of the copyright law.
I have two solutions for that.
DMCA
Just like the record companies are doing with poor Uni students, us poor
authors can fight back. All we need to do is search for any of our works on
Google, and then send a DMCA 'Cease and Desist' to TurnItIn
Alternately, it may be possible to get TurnItIn to do the work for you. All
you would need to do woule be to provide enough information to them to
identify documents that you have copright over (Such as Name, Possable WWW
sites, Possible Subjects, Possible Email Addresses) and then have them
removed from their archive
Royalties
As an author I am legally entitled to royalties for commercial exploitation
of my works. Since TurnItIn are exploiting my work, I am entitled to
royalties from them. Since I am not generating much content I believe that I
am entitled to one cent per year royalty.
The power with this is that when enough people claim this royalty there will
be a huge ammount of paper work generated. This claim can also be for past
use of works so there is no way for them to get out of paying by just
deleting your content from their databases.
With many banks charging a dollar or more per cheque the financial
implications are amazing. Also it should be remembered that for many
organisations the cost of processing a single invoice may be $10-100
depending on if a purchase order needs to be raised.
Conclusion
As you can guess, I am not happy with the business model of TurnItIn. I am
not for people breaking copyright, I am just for people given the choice to
how their works are exploited.
What can we do about it?
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darryl@radio-active.net.au
This page was last updated 2005-09-01 09:14:05
This page was last compiled 2005-11-15 19:13:17
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