[Web4lib] Interesting copyright argument

[Jennifer Heise]

One of my colleagues attended a TurnItIn.com seminar. Among the handouts was
a 'legal analysis' of the intellectual property issues involved in the way
TurnItIn.com uses student work.  Part of it sez.

"... the archival [sic] raises the issue of whether the conversion of the
work to electronic form and maintenance of it in a database, constitutes
'fair use' of a work. . .
Commercial use of a work may still be 'fair use' under U.S. Copyright Law
especiall when less than the entire work is being used, and/or the use does
not 'materially impair the marketability of the work which is copied."
Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enters. Here the original work is
used by the TURNITIN system only as a reference, for purposes of creating a
separate work, the digital "fingerprint." If there is a match between a
submitted work and fingerprinted portions of an archived student work , only
that matching text is highlighted in the originality report."

As a result, the analysis concludes, "other aspects of the TURNITIN system,
such as archiving . . . are allowable as 'fair uses' of the copyrighted
material."

I thought this was interesting vis-a-vis the many copyright discussions
surrounding scanning of copyrighted material in general.

I don't know whether TurnItIn.com is germane to the list, though it is an
aspect of web stuff that many libraries are having to discuss. But I thought
the copyright analysis was interesting.

-- Jenne Heise