A federal judge in Alexandria ruled this month that a commercial plagiarism-detection tool called Turnitin does not violate the copyright of students who are required to submit their papers through the service. Four high school students had sued iParadigms, which operates Turnitin, arguing that the company included their papers in the system without their permission.
The judge ruled that although the company stores digital copies of their essays in a database, the archiving is fair use of the papers and provides "a substantial public benefit.” The decision has implications for other digital archiving services, such as Google Library, which scans and indexes books online.
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