Followup on my post about plagarism software

I wrote this morning about how my high school made the front page of the Washington Post with student objections to a new plagarism program.

Joel commented "What I find interesting is the student's complaint that it violates their copywrite and their worry about their intellectual property. That sounds like an admission that they intend to sell their papers to other students!"

I didn't know what the deal with that was either, and y'all know me and leaving well enough alone. I called someone I know who is in a position to know about such things. She explained that the copyright issue is that once you submit a paper to this program, the program keeps a copy of the paper in its database forever.

Thus, if you use your sister's paper from two years ago, the database will catch it. The problem is, they are taking your paper and keeping it in their database and making a lot of money selling access to their database.

At best it's shaky, IMHO. At least until schools start making you sign away the rights to all your high school papers over to this company.

TheCSO made the point that it is probably pretty foolhardy to be trying this in a neighborhood that is probably a contender for the highest number of intellectual property lawyers per capita in the country.

CC