Turn It In

There was an article in the paper a few days back about how Macquarie University is paying TurnItIn A$30,000 per year for their servies to stamp out plagarism. Whilst I object to cheating, I even object more to this business.

I have detailed some of the arguments about this business – about how they decided to initally index my writings without my express permission. This organisation is trawling the Web and copying anything that is useful, and then charging for access. And I as an Author get nothing regardless of if they find someone copying my work or not.

To make it worse, these universities have given TurnItIn permission to store students work regardless of their wishes on the subject. In most cases assignments are the sole property of the student since there has not been active involvement of tutors or lecturers in their generation.

I am wondering how many authors have writings stored by this company with no knowledge. Too Many I suspect.

On the work front today I feel as if I got very little done. With attempting to debug WebServices and modifying Blogger templates (which now look fantastic) I am sure I could have been more productive. Maybe tomorrow will be better. I have so much software to write. So little time to do it.