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This post focuses on： The Weapons of War [Hate the metaphor!], The Problems with the Solutions, Setting Up for Failure, and Is There a Better Way? [title case applied]. "There's also an ethical issue with plagiarism checkers - the questionable use of students' work as a money maker for these services. ... Turnitin and the other services are making money off of content that they did not create. Perhaps worse, unlike Facebook where the content owner typically uploads it willingly, students have no say in whether their paper is uploaded by the teacher to the plagiarism checker. Many students and teachers are less than thrilled by this idea. Turnitin has specifically claimed fair use in defense of its use of this content, and in 2008 Turnitin's parent company iParadigms won a lawsuit brought against the company by four students claiming copyright violation. In its ruling, the court agreed that the content's use was indeed fair. 'It is clear that iParadigms' use of the Plaintiff's works has caused no harm to the market value of these works,' Judge Claude Hilton ruled at the time. That has not stopped faculty and students from having qualms about the use of students' papers in a for-profit enterprise." (The Problems with the Solution, para. 4-7)

NYU Prof Vows Never to Probe Cheating Again-and Faces a Backlash; July 21, 2011, 6:13 pm [no overt time zone]; by Marc Parry

Harrington suggests that plagiarism is endemic, and that originality reports from automated checking services enable writers to polish their work to make plagiarism difficult to detect.