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Wednesday, March 19, 2014, 2:00-5:30 p.m. in Grand Ballroom IV, JW Marriott Indianapolis

We warmly invite all CCCC conference attendees to the annual open meeting of the Caucus on Intellectual Property and Composition/Communication Studies (CCCC-IP). During this meeting, we welcome scholars with questions and concerns about intellectual property to join us in discussions of how intellectual property affects the work of scholars, teachers, and students in our field.

The IP Caucus is the public and open counterpart to the work of the CCCC Committee on Intellectual Property. Since its founding in 1994, the caucus has explored IP issues pertinent to our academic field and beyond, including the following:

• plagiarism and authorship
• student and teacher rights related to intellectual property
• copyright and copyleft as they relate to scholarship and teaching
• best practices in teaching students and instructors about intellectual property issues
• open access and open-source policies
• contemporary issues in intellectual property, such as corporate surveillance and collection of user metadata (as related to scholarship in composition and communication)

This year’s interactive, action-focused meeting includes a breakout session into four roundtable groups. Each roundtable group, led by a facilitator, will discuss a particular set of IP issues in order to elicit practical solutions, action plans, lobbying strategies, and the production of documents for political, professional, and pedagogical use within the CCCs and beyond. Near the end of the meeting, the roundtables reconvene to share their discussions, plans, and recommendations for future action.

This year’s Caucus will feature four roundtables:

1. Legal and Legislative Developments

A roundtable focused on finding ways to safeguard the ability of students and teachers to make appropriate use of copyrighted material in furtherance of legitimate educational goals. In previous years, this roundtable included discussion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), and court cases relevant to the educational community (such as the lawsuit involving Georgia State University’s use of electronic reserve materials for educational purposes).

2. Sharing IP Stories: Teaching IP, Copyright/Copyleft, and Openness

A place for participants to share stories, resources, and successful pedagogies for teaching the complex and overlapping issues of intellectual property, plagiarism, and copyright in composition classes. Participants will also be invited to join in planning ways to distribute these pedagogies, as voices that can counteract the rhetoric of fear and criminality pervading discourse on IP.

3. Advocating for Open Access in Composition Studies

A roundtable focused on identifying strategies that teachers and scholars might use to foster greater use of and acceptance of Open Access practices—especially given the academic/economic climate of rising subscription fees for scholarly journals and initiatives for the privatization of public knowledge. In previous years, this roundtable discussed issues such as funding concerns associated with scholarly publication (including attention to OA-aligned imprints such as CCDP and Parlor Press that publish composition scholarship), the impacts of and frequencies of citation of articles in our field, and possible lobbying strategies for OA practices.

4. Evolving IP Policies for Journals

This roundtable updates participants on the latest publisher policies and their potential impact on Writing Studies. Since science-oriented journals tend to influence the academic publishing community as a whole, this year’s roundtable will focus on the following issues: 1) new IP policies from publishers of scientific journals in relation to the rise of distributed, open-access venues for displaying data; dealing with greater numbers of authors; a perceived rise in scientific fraud cases; and new templates for article formats and 2) some journal publishers’ policy of requiring copyright permissions to be secured for article epigraphs, which treats these epigraphs as different from quotations analyzed within the body an academic article.

For more information about the IP Caucus, we invite you to visit the IP Reports section of the CCCC web site. We also invite you to meet members of IP Caucus through Tim Amidon’s (Spring 2013) digital piece “Spotlight on Intellectual Property: An Interview with Members of the CCCC IP Caucus” in issue 17.2 of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.

For more information about the CCCC IP meeting, contact this year’s meeting organizer and senior chair of the IP Caucus: Dr. Kyle Stedman, assistant professor of English at Rockford College, at kstedman@rockford.edu or on Twitter @kstedman. You can also contact the IP Caucus’ junior chair, Tim Amidon, PhD candidate at University of Rhode Island, at timothy_amidon@mail.uri.edu or on Twitter @timothyamidon.

 

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As is always the case, on the last day of this year’s annual Conference on College Composition and Communication a business meeting was held at which various motions are voted upon. The Intellectual Property Committee, with input from the Intellectual Property Caucus, has been discussing the issue of plagiarism detection services (PDSs) and this year introduced a motion on the subject. This motion addressed several concerns about PDSs, including questions about whether such services threaten the rights of students to their own intellectual property. This concern arises from the fact that such services typically create databases out of papers submitted by students. A student, by uploading a paper to a PDS, may be ceding control over his or her intellectual property, which is then used for the financial benefit of a for-profit entity.

The issue of the intellectual property rights of students was not, however, the only one addressed by the motion. The Intellectual Property Committee and the Caucus was also concerned about the effects such services have on students’ sense of agency, on the learning environment, and on the role of the educator in addressing students’ use of sources. The motion not only articulated those concerns but also advocated educators “intervene and combat the potential negative influences” of PDSs, either by seeking alternatives to such services or, if utilizing them, by doing so according to best practices.

After discussion, the motion was passed as introduced. The full text of the motion is below.

WHEREAS CCCC does not endorse the use of plagiarism detection services;

WHEREAS plagiarism detection services can compromise academic integrity by potentially undermining students’ agency as writers, treating all students as always already plagiarists, creating a hostile learning environment, shifting the responsibility of identifying and interpreting source misuse from teachers to technology, and compelling students to agree to licensing agreements that threaten their privacy and rights to their own intellectual property;

WHEREAS plagiarism detection services potentially negatively change the role of the writing teacher; construct ill-conceived notions of originality and writing; disavow the complexities of writing in and with networked, digital technologies; and treat students as non-writers;

WHEREAS composition teacher-scholars can intervene and combat the potential negative influences of PDSs by educating colleagues about the realities of plagiarism and the troubling outcomes of using PDSs; advocating actively against the adoption of such services; modeling and sharing ideas for productive writing pedagogy; and conducting research into alternative pedagogical strategies to address plagiarism, including honor codes and process pedagogy;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the Conference on College Composition and Communication commends institutions that offer sound pedagogical alternatives to PDS; encourages institutions that use PDS to implement practices in the best interests of their students, including notifying students at the beginning of the term that the service will be used, providing students with a non-coercive and convenient opt out process, and inviting students to submit drafts to the service before turning in final text.

For related articles on the issue of Plagiarism Detection Services, see these earlier IP Reports: Michael J. Klein’s “IP Caucus Roundtable: Students’ Rights to Their Writing and to the Writing of Others” and Kim Gainer’s “Plagiarism Detection Services: Unsettled Questions.” See also Traci A. Zimmerman’s “McClean Students File Suit against Turnitin.com: Useful Tool or Instrument of Tyranny?” in Top Intellectual Property Developments of 2007 for Scholars of Composition, Rhetoric, and Communication and Wendy Warren Austin’s “Virginia High School Students Rebel against Mandatory Use of Turnitin.com” in Major Intellectual Property Developments of 2006 for Scholars of Composition, Rhetoric, and Communication.

Intellectual Property Reports Main Page

Introduction to the 2013 CCCC-IP Annual

• Downloadable PDF of the report.
• Downloadable Word Document of the report.
      

This is the ninth volume of the CCCC Intellectual Property Annual, my seventh as editor. I’ve been reflecting lately about the type of authorship we engage in as we create the CCCC Intellectual Property Annual each year. This publication is not quite like a typical edited collection or issue of a journal. Ever since John Logie started the Annual, the calls for submissions included specific suggested topics – events that took place over the previous year in copyright and intellectual property news. I followed suit when I took over; I suggested a few topics, but when those were claimed, there were other people who also wanted to write for the Annual. I encouraged them to write about any topic they found interesting, but they preferred that I provide a list of additional topics.

So that’s been my invention process: I collect news over the course of the year, and toward the end of each calendar year, I sift through the archives of the Creative Commons blog and the Electronic Frontier Foundation blog, and I generate a list of events for contributors to write about. I post this list, first to the IP Caucus list, and then to the other rhetoric and composition listservs, while still inviting people to write about other events. People claim the subjects they want to write about, and before too long, the new CCCC-IP Annual is published. What I do could be called distributed authorship, macro-authorship, cooperative authorship, or delegated authorship. I’m thinking of doing something similar in my first-year writing classes, but on a subject selected by the students.

The 2013 Annual features a report from Mike Edwards about Elsevier’s ordering scholars to take down the copies of their journal articles that they’d posted to academia.edu and the counter-movement among some professors who pledge not to review for or submit articles to journals published by Elsevier. Laurie Cubbison explores the debate about whether or not Arthur Conan Doyle’s work can be legally considered as an oeuvre for copyright purposes — some stories are in the public domain, but the last one in the series is still under copyright, so are the characters protected?

Chris Gerben gives us an overview of the Copyright Alert System — ISPs detect possible copyright infringement and send “warnings” to users, with the possible slowing down of their internet speed. Copyright activists, Gerben claims, overreacted to the CAS when it was formed, and calls for a more measured rhetorical response when encountering such content industry strategies. Timothy Amidon reports the problems in the formation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which seems to be in a star chamber. It stands to extend all the nations’ copyright terms to those of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the architectural regulation of software will inhibit free exchange of ideas.

One of the more memorable copyright skirmishes from 2013 was toy company GoldieBlox’s use of the song “Girls” by the Beastie Boys in their online commercial. Kyle Stedman gives us a very lucid parsing of the various factors in play in this case. Traci Zimmerman reviews The Future of Creative Commons: Realizing the Value of Sharing in a Digital World, which reflects on Creative Commons’ accomplishments over the last decade and gives an idea of what their future plans are, including translating their documents into multiple languages and making their licenses truly global in reach. Finally, Kim Gainer walks us through the fair use test as applied by the court to Google’s digitization of books.

I will close by saying that we are now well into 2014, and I am gearing up for the next issue of the CCCC Intellectual Property Annual. I don’t want to give any spoilers, but I will say that I want to be a bit less conventional regarding genre in the future. When John Logie first started the Annual, he described the articles he was looking for as “a step up from a blog post.” Certainly we will still have several of those. However, I would like to branch out into listicles (“Ten Things Rhetoric and Composition Teachers Need to Know about _____”), short tweet-style annotated bibliographies, and image macros or someecards with brief accompanying analyses. Taking the humor about authorship seriously can yield some insights that we can share with each other and with students. Here are some examples, the last, and cleverest, one by Collin Brooke.

Martine Courant Rife
Senior Chair, CCCC-IP Caucus
Lansing Community College
martinerife@gmail.com

Mike Edwards
Junior Chair, CCCC-IP Caucus
United States Military Academy
preterite@gmail.com

If you are planning to attend the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Louisville, KY, please consider attending the meeting of the Caucus on Intellectual Property and Composition/Communication Studies (CCCC-IP) that will take place the afternoon of Wednesday, March 21st. Since 1994, the Caucus has sponsored explorations of intellectual property issues pertinent to teachers, scholars, and students. Meeting in simultaneous roundtables, participants discuss topics such as plagiarism and authorship, student and teacher IP rights, open access and open source policies, and best practices in teaching students and instructors about IP. Roundtable speakers will provide overviews of their topics, and participants will then create action plans, develop lobbying strategies, and produce documents for political, professional, and pedagogical use. At the end of the workshop, participants reconvene to share their plans and recommendations for future action.

This year, the Caucus will feature seven roundtables:

DMCA Exemption
The first roundtable will survey recent developments in the realm of Digital Millennium Copyright Act(DMCA) as they affect education, with an eye toward proposing actions that the caucus can take to ameliorate the impact of the act.Since its passage in 1998, the DMCA, which criminalizes the circumvention of Digital Rights Management and seeks to restrict the use of copyrighted material on the internet, has been invoked in ways that go beyond the legitimate protection of intellectual property rights. The default setting, as it were, is to bar all use, regardless of whether it is fair use. As documented by the Electronic Freedom Foundation, the DMCA has been used as a way of stifling critique and as a tool that companies can wield against competitors. Such outcomes may not have been intended by the framers of the DMCA, but their existence has implications for students and educators, whether on the K-12 or college level. The 2012 DMCA Exemption rulemaking proceedings are now underway, and roundtable participants will be updated on these proceedings.

Plagiarism
Participants in the second roundtable will consider how best to develop a student-centered plagiarism policy for the twenty-first century. Language currently used to describe plagiarism reflects the notion that students need to be policed by faculty lest students commit plagiarism, be caught and be found guilty of such an infraction. Many, if not all, plagiarism statements reify this antagonistic relationship between faculty and students, treating plagiarism as something students must avoid lest they be punished for the infraction. Rather than having the students inactively participate in this process, students could be empowered through the formulation of plagiarism statements creating bilateral dialogues rather than unilateral diatribes. Participants in this roundtable will be invited to review a draft of a student-centered plagiarism statement formulated by members of the IP caucus during the past year. The hope is that this type of statement can act as a means of engaging students in discussions on the effects of plagiarism rather than simply presenting them with a list of punishments for committing plagiarism.

IP and Metadata
Another roundtable will look at the implications of the participatory nature of the web, which raises questions about the ownership of “metadata” and user-generated content. From Facebook profiles to Google Analytics to Google searches to cellphone geolocation to RFIDs in identification cards for consumer goods, user-generated content and data are an important part of the participatory web. Value is co-created by and for a community of users who contribute content and generate data through their online interactions. However, often these contributions are made without clear understandings among users about their ownership and privacy rights. These texts and meta-texts say a lot about who users are, what they do, where they do it, how, and perhaps even why. But who has access and control of these texts and who can claim ownership to the information that users author about themselves? This roundtable will invite participants to consider who claims and/or should claim ownership and authorship of user-generated content and metadata. Participantsalso will discuss related concerns over users’ rights to safe and ethical composing in contemporary digital spaces. One goal of the roundtable will be to identify the relevant issues for intellectual property scholars in rhetoric and composition that should be further explored and researched.

Fair Use
Participants in the fourth roundtable will have an opportunity to consider the implications of several significant “fair use” cases, including that of Georgia State. For the past three years, Cambridge and Oxford University Presses and Sage Publishing have been pursuing Georgia State University representatives in court over online reserves and courseware systems that make available to students articles and book chapters without paying for permissions. In September of 2010, Judge Orinda Evans narrowed the scope of litigation by limiting trial to contributory infringement. The outcome of this case will likely set the standards for these distribution systems, just as Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko’s Graphics Corporation and Princeton University Press V. Michigan Document Services, Inc. did for course packs. The speaker at this roundtable will update participants on the outcomes of this case and the implications for universities and university libraries. He will also identify other pending fair use cases that may impact faculty and student work in higher education.

Copyright and Pedagogy
The fifth roundtable will provide educators with the opportunity to both contribute and learn about approaches to teaching about ownership, fair use, and related issues. In particular, teachers will be invited to share their stories, resources, and ideas about successful pedagogies for teaching the complex and overlapping issues of intellectual property, plagiarism, and copyright in composition classes. Participants in the roundtable also will be invited to considerhow these pedagogies may be distributed to others and how their voices may be able to counteract the rhetoric of fear and criminality pervading discourse on IP.

Copyright and Scholarly Publishing
Participants in the sixth roundtable will examine evolving IP policies for journals, with a particular emphasis on the precedents being set in scientific publishing. Recently, two trends have led publishers of scientific journals to establish new IP policies. First, a number of scientific fraud and questionable authorship cases have led to revised definitions of scientific authorship and the use of professional plagiarism detection services. Second, government mandates across the globe have demanded open access to both published articles and relevant data. Because the policies of scientific journals tend to influence academic publishing as a whole, this roundtable will update participants on the latest policies and their potential impact on Writing Studies.

Authors’ Rights and Responsibility
The last roundtable will look at intellectual property issues in the context of creative writing and will ask what “publishing” means to the authors of such literature. One of the promising developments for creative writers has been the increased status given to online literary journals. With print journals becoming increasingly limited, online literature can be where the truly cutting edge fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction happens. However, how do traditional journals and their standard First North American Rights view web spaces? An online literary journal seems clearly to be a prior publication, but what about blogs? What about comment drafting as in the April PAD (Poem a Day) competition on Poetic Asides? The result for some of the major print players, most notably Poetry, is to consider any web presence as prior publication, thus eliminating the work from consideration. The goal for participants at this table is to speculate about reasonable solutions to the discontinuity between print/web standards and generate strategies for writers who use blogs for prewriting, drafting, or metadiscourse.

We hope to see everyone in St. Louis! For questions or further information, please contact this year’s caucus chair, Martine Courant Rife, martinerife@gmail.com.

This column is sponsored by the Intellectual Property Committee of the CCCC and the CCCC-Intellectual Property Caucus. The IP Caucus maintains a mailing list. If you would like to receive notices of programs sponsored by the Caucus or of opportunities to submit articles to either this column or to an annual report on intellectual property issues, please contact kgainer@radford.edu.

 

Intellectual Property Reports Main Page

If you are planning to visit the annual Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Las Vegas this March, please consider attending the Wednesday afternoon meeting on Intellectual Property in Composition Studies. This session, sponsored by the Caucus on Intellectual Property and Composition/Communication Studies (CCCC-IP), explores issues of copyright, fair use, openness, remix, access, and the ownership and use of intellectual property (IP). The Caucus is the public and open counterpart to the work of the CCCC Committee on Intellectual Property, and since 1994 has sponsored explorations of IP issues pertinent to teachers, scholars, and students. All are welcome to the practical and action-focused meetings, where participants work in roundtables to discuss topics such as plagiarism and authorship, student and teacher IP rights, open access and open source policies, and best practices in teaching students and instructors about IP. Roundtable leaders provide overviews of their topics, and participants then create action plans, develop lobbying strategies, and produce documents for political, professional, and pedagogical use. At the end of the workshop, participants reconvene to share their plans and recommendations for future action.

This year’s Caucus will feature four roundtables. The first, on Legal and Legislative Developments, will host a discussion of the year’s legal and legislative IP developments as they affect students and educators. In previous years our colleagues at this table have discussed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which under some circumstances can have an adverse impact on what students and faculty are able to accomplish in the classroom. Other subjects of discussion have included the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), each proposed in 2011 and withdrawn in 2012 in the face of intense criticism. Discussions have also touched on court cases being closely watched by the educational community, such as one involving Georgia State University’s system of electronic reserves. No matter what the specific topics, discussion will revolve around finding ways to safeguard the ability of students and teachers to make appropriate use of copyrighted material in
furtherance of legitimate educational goals.

Participants at the second roundtable, Sharing IP Stories: Teaching IP, Copyright/left, and Openness, will be invited to share their stories, resources, and successful pedagogies for teaching the complex and overlapping issues of intellectual property, plagiarism, and copyright in composition classes. Participants will also be invited to join in planning ways to distribute these pedagogies, as voices that can counteract the rhetoric of fear and criminality pervading discourse on IP. Examples of sharing include IP stories uploaded to the DALN (Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives) to reach a large community, perhaps even beyond composition studies.

At the third roundtable, Advocating for Open Access in Composition Studies, participants will seek to identify strategies composition and rhetoric teachers and scholars might use to foster greater acceptance and use of Open Access practices within and beyond our discipline. Open Access (OA) practices are increasingly important in an economic climate of rising subscription fees for scholarly journals and initiatives for the privatization of public knowledge, as evidenced by Reed Elsevier’s sponsoring of the Research Works Act that sought to close off public access to taxpayer-funded scholarship. Discussion focuses on issues of Green and Gold OA, funding concerns associated with scholarly publication (including attention to OA-aligned imprints such as CCDP and Parlor Press that publish composition scholarship), citation impact, and aligning possible lobbying strategies with NCTE’s DC office.

Participants at the last roundtable will examine the Evolving IP Policies for Journals that are shaping scholarly journals and publication practices. Discussion will focuses on two cases. First, publishers of scientific journals have begun to establish new IP policies as they respond to greater numbers of authors; distributed, open-access venues for displaying data; a perceived rise in scientific fraud cases; and new templates for article formats. These developments are noteworthy as the policies of scientific journals tend to influence academic publishing as a whole. Second, some journal publishers are now requiring copyright permissions be secured for article epigraphs, treating them as different from quotations analyzed within the body of a text. This roundtable updates participants on the latest policies and their potential impact on Writing Studies.

The roundtables will take place on Wednesday, March 13, from 2-5:30 p.m., on the first floor of the Riviera Hotel, in Grande Ballroom C. This year’s meeting organizer and senior chair of the Caucus is Dr. Mike Edwards, assistant professor of English at Washington State University, who can be reached at mike.edwards@wsu.edu. He has been assisted by the junior chair, Dr. Kyle Stedman, assistant professor of English at Rockford College, who can be reached at kstedman@rockford.edu.

 

Intellectual Property Reports Main Page

Kyle Stedman, University of South Florida

Introduction: Assuaging the Fear

In his keynote address at the 2009 Educause Conference, Lawrence Lessig discussed the intersections of copyright and scholarship. His talk is summarized in a short Inside Higher Ed piece, where it predictably received online comments from both copylefters and copyright supporters (Kolowich). One commenter, writing with concern for underpaid junior faculty whose work is profited on by publishers, writes, “I’m delighted Dr. Lessig can afford to give away the results of his own labor; but it seems a misplaced priority for him to work so hard to assure the lowest paid members of his community have even less opportunity to make ends meet.” In other words, loosening the reins of copyright from scholarship could mean less revenue for producers of academic work.

This comment can be read as one voice of a common fear felt by many content producers, whether of scholarship, fiction, music, or video: I need to reserve all my rights to this content, not just some of them. What will happen if I lose control of my work, if people profit from my labor, and I don’t?

Though there is mounting research and anecdotal evidence to support the claim that distributing free books can actually increase sales (Neilan; Doctorow), the fears of those like the Inside Higher Ed commenter are understandable. But I believe that a recent development from the ever-growing nonprofit Creative Commons (CC) can speak to these fears by offering content producers more avenues for communicating their licensing decisions to (re)users. Creative Commons Plus (CC+) increases communication between composers and users about how content may be used and, importantly, can help composers bridge the gap between giving away content for free and earning money from it. By telling users in plain language exactly what they can and cannot do with content, including information about when and how to pay for a license, composers should be able to breathe easier, knowing that users who should pay for legitimate uses beyond those allowed by an existing CC license can now know exactly how to go about doing so.1

Basic Functionality

The heart of CC+ is simple. All CC licenses allow certain uses of content and forbid others–say, by allowing someone to remix content but forbidding commercial uses. Some doors are opened, and others are closed. By using CC+, a composer in effect says, “Sure I’ve licensed this content in a way that closes some doors, but I could give you the key under certain circumstances. If you’re interested, here’s how you can get the key.” In other words, CC+ provides a way for content creators who have licensed their work with any CC license to easily communicate with users how to get permission for uses beyond those allowed by the CC license.

CC+ is described on the CC Wiki as a “protocol” and an “architecture,” not as a new license. Therefore, a composer’s decision to use CC+ is communicated to users alongside her existing licensing language, not in place of it. When using creativecommons.org to license material, composers are asked a series of questions about what kinds of uses they choose to allow; with the advent of CC+, composers are now given the option of adding a link to a “more permissions URL.” When they add a url in this field, the auto-generated html includes the same material as before–a clickable icon taking users to a plain-language description of the license–but this icon is followed by additional text stating, “Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at . . .” (“CCPlus”).

The code for this link is also automatically given the RDFa attribute rel=cc:morePermissions, following the CC recommendation “for machine-readable expression of copyright licensing terms and related information” (Abelson et al). In other words, the composer’s choice to make it easy for users to obtain more permissions is communicated both visually to users who see the extra link and technologically to other machines that can automatically understand that the link is one that takes users to an explanation of how to obtain more permissions. Because of this RDFa attribute, when users click through to the plain language description of the license, javascript on the license page recognizes the presence of CC+ and adds to the plain language page a + symbol and a link to the more permissions URL.

Three Examples

CC+ makes most sense when considered with some examples:

Example 1: The Musician

A musician hopes to make money from sales of her music, but she also loves sharing her work for free. She licenses her songs with a CC license that allows anyone to download her music and share it on whatever sites they wish, as long as users attribute the music to her, don’t make money from it, and don’t remix it in any way (a CC BY-NC-ND license). This way people will be exposed to her sound and return to her site to buy CDs, find a link to her work on iTunes, and donate.

When she hears about CC+, she returns to creativecommons.org to relicense her material, this time with a link added in the “more permissions url” field. The link takes users to a page of her site that explains the fees she charges for anyone wanting to use her music in a commercial context or to remix it. The html icon and link generated by CC now automatically includes a link to her “more permissions” page; she easily replaces the html on her site with this new code. And if she wants, she can easily design her own new icon to replace the “Permissions beyond the scope of this license” text with a second button that simply says “Looking to license? Looking to remix?” so that users will see two clean buttons on each page of her site: one that takes them to the plain-language description of her license, and one that takes them to her more permissions page.

Before CC+ she could license additional uses on her own, but the CC+ protocol gives her an easier way to communicate her additional license requirements, integrating her additional communication into her existing communication framework (simple new language on her site; a simple new icon that appears on the plain language description of her license).

Example 2: The Scholar

A scholar publishes an article in Kairos, a refereed online journal on rhetoric and technology. Because he retains copyrights to his work, he also posts a copy of the article on his blog under a CC license that allows others to freely reprint and remix his work as long they attribute the work to him and use it only for noncommercial uses (a CC BY-NC license).

But he wants to make sure that readers know that they can request a license to use his work for commercial purposes; all anyone has to do is email him, and he’ll decide whether or not to allow use on a case-by-case basis. To facilitate that conversation, he uses CC+ by inserting a link to a “more permissions” link when licensing the article–in this case, a link to the “contact” section of his professional website, which instructs people simply to email him with licensing questions. A commercial publisher finds this article on the scholar’s blog and wants to anthologize it in a textbook on digital writing; the publisher follows the CC+ link to the page with instructions on how to proceed.

Example 3: The Journal

Molecular Systems Biology, an open access journal published by the Nature Publishing Group, allows its authors to decide between two CC licenses, neither of which allow readers to use the articles for commercial uses. Authors can choose a license that requires any alterations of the articles to be distributed under the same license (CC BY-NC-SA) or a license that doesn’t allow any alterations at all (CC BY-NC-ND). The journal’s site adds, “Any of the above conditions can be waived if users get permission from the copyright holder” (“Open Access”).

If the journal decided to build CC+ into its site architecture, the journal could also ask submitting authors if they would like to manage permissions beyond the CC licenses or if they would prefer the journal to handle all requests (provided the journal has the resources, of course). Each article would then be accompanied with the existing text describing the authors’ chosen license along with information about how to obtain extra permissions–either by contacting the authors or the journal, depending on the authors’ choice.

In practice, use of CC+ can be implemented by the user as described above or by using a content management service like Ozmo, a site owned by the Copyright Clearance Center that helps composers implement CC+ by streamlining the licensing process, managing any licensing fees that users pay, and allowing users to search for content through their site. The musician or scholar in the above example could sign up with Ozmo and then direct users to their Ozmo pages to learn how to use content in ways that exceed their chosen CC license, and Ozmo would handle all the finances.

Implications

Implications for the CC Movement

One major implication of CC+ is its potential as a mediating tool between the rhetoric of the commons that pervades in open access and free culture communities and the rhetoric of fear that pervades in legal and corporate discourses. Let’s return to the online comment I discussed at the beginning of this article: the commenter sees the open education movement as suggesting that he happily work for free, giving away his work to anyone who wants it, leaving him penniless. Some feel that even using relatively restrictive Creative Commons licenses should be avoided, since doing so means releasing content into the wild of the Internet, where the ease of digital copying means giving up control to others who may want to “steal” his work. (Of course, copyrighted material online is often just as findable and copyable, but the rhetoric against Creative Commons sometimes forgets this.)

But CC+ addresses the needs of those who want to share but are afraid, potentially increasing the numbers of those who support and implement various CC licenses. CC+ implicitly says to these authors, “If you want to charge people who use your work for certain uses, that’s great! We support you making money from your compositions! Let us help you communicate with users about how they should get in touch with you to pay you.” And of course, it could be argued that the act of using any CC license, especially with the CC+ protocol, makes it less likely that content will be used outside of the scope of its license, given that its allowed uses are brought into the open with human-readable text that is harder to ignore than the silence of content that is posted online and automatically copyrighted but without any copyright notice.

Implications for Scholars

More practically, scholars could use CC+ to license drafts of essays they’re working on. The CC license would encourage other scholars to share and distribute the essay without any fear of overstepping boundaries (say, by downloading the essay and hosting it on a course or department web site for others to comment on), but the + would clarify that any other uses beyond the CC license need to be cleared first with the author (say, if a publisher comes across the essay and wants to publish it commercially, or if a teacher wants to adapt an excerpt for a class handout).

Implications for Teaching Communities

On a larger scale, sites that host content with CC licenses could use CC+ to clarify what options users have when using their material, and perhaps even to profit from it. Sites like MIT’s OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu) and, on a smaller scale, the University of South Florida’s CollegeWriting (collegewriting.us) collect content and pedagogical materials and share them using a CC BY-NC-SA license. If either of these sites adopted CC+, they could easily instruct users how to pay for other uses of these materials. For instance, they could make it easier for someone who wanted to adapt an essay assignment to post on another university’s site that doesn’t use a CC share-alike license, or if someone wanted to include a quiz found on one of these sites in a commercial publication.

Implications for Publishing

And at the publishing level, journals and publishing companies that allow authors to retain copyright to their work could help authors better understand their options by facilitating licensing choices, including CC+. For example, open access journals (like Molecular Systems Biology in example 3 above) could use CC+ to direct readers looking for additional licensing options to a page on the journal’s site, on the author’s personal site, or to an Ozmo page, depending on the choice of the contributor.

This mindset of clearly communicating licensing options could also be applied to the more informal publishing that constantly happens on the web, including statements and resolutions issued by scholarly organizations. For instance, Wendy Austin, a scholar in rhetoric and composition, wrote in 2006 to the Writing Program Administrators listserv about her issues licensing the official WPA statement on plagiarism (“Defining and Avoiding”), which at that time had the relatively restrictive CC BY-ND-NC license. (The statement’s license has since been updated to the less restrictive CC BY-ND license.) Austin wanted to publish the statement, which she describes as a “foundation” for her book’s argument, in whole as an appendix to her book on plagiarism, which was to be published by a commercial publisher (Austin). She asked for advice from Chris Anson, a major scholar in rhetoric and composition, and eventually paid the $100 licensing fee to the WPA treasurer for the right to publish the statement in full in a commercial textbook. If CC+ had existed in 2006, it would have simplified this exchange, cutting out the need to ask around for advice about how to proceed, since at the bottom of the statement’s web page and on the CC license page Austin would have been given clear directions for how to obtain the permissions–probably with a link to a page explaining how to pay fees.

Conclusion

In an email response to me, CC Web Engineer Nathan Kinkade wrote, “My sense is that the uptake of CC+ has been very small, at least from the tech. perspective of using ccREL (RDFa) to express CC+.” Though his gut impression is obviously different than a detailed survey of CC implementation, it still suggests a need for further action. My impression is that as CC licenses become increasingly visible on popular sites like Flickr and Wikipedia, the added protocol of CC+ could do much to alleviate the fears of those who aren’t yet ready to commit to alternatives to “all rights reserved.”

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Wendy Austin and Nathan Kinkade for allowing me to quote their email messages in this piece, and to Nathan for his patience with me as I worked through the technical side of CC+ implementation.

Works Cited

Abelson, Hal, Ben Adida, Mike Linksvayer, and Nathan Yergler. “ccREL: The Creative Commons Rights Expression Language.” Creative Commons Wiki. Creative Commons, 3 Mar. 2008. Web. 1 Mar. 2010.

Austin, Wendy. “Re: Using the WPA Outcomes Statement.” Message to The WPA-L Listserv. 19 Dec. 2006. E-mail.

“CCPlus.” Creative Commons Wiki. Creative Commons, 18 Jun. 2009. Web. 9 Feb. 2010.

“Creative Commons Launches CC0 and CC+ Programs.” Creative Commons Wiki. Creative Commons, 17 Dec. 2007. Web. 1 Mar. 2010.

“Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices.” Council of Writing Program Administrators. The Council of Writing Program Administrators, 2003. Web. 16 Feb. 2010.

Doctorow, Cory. “Giving it Away.” Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. San Francisco: Tachyon, 2008. 71-75. Cory Doctorow: Content. Web. 25 Feb. 2010.

Kinkade, Nathan. “Re: A comment from Kyle Stedman.” Message to the author. 9 Feb. 2010. E-mail.

Kolowich, Steve. “A Call for Copyright Rebellion.” Inside Higher Ed. Inside Higher Ed, 6 Nov. 2009. Web. 16 Feb. 2010.

Neilan, Catherine. “TOC: Piracy may boost sales, research suggests.” The Bookseller.com. The Nielsen Company, 13 Oct. 2009. Web. 25 Feb. 2010.

“Open Access.” Molecular Systems Biology. Nature Publishing Group, n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2010.

*****

1 CC+ was actually announced in a December 2007 press release (“Creative Commons Launches”). Its inclusion in this collection of 2009’s top developments is thus rather behind the times. However, its importance and relatively minor use justify its inclusion here, however awkwardly it may sit.

Clancy Ratliff, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

In December 2007, President Bush signed into law the NIH Open Access policy, which concretized what had been an agenda item in the open access movement for over three years. This policy requires scholars who receive NIH funding for their research to submit copies of publications based on that research to PubMed Central, an open access repository. They must do this within 12 months of the article’s publication in a professional journal or other scholarly venue. In the following report, I will describe the timeline and reasons for the policy, how the policy works, and its implications for research in disciplines other than the medical sciences, including rhetoric and composition.

Original Proposal and Rationale for Open Access to NIH-Funded Research

What is now the open access mandate was for over two years prior only voluntary. The original policy was proposed in 2004 by the House Appropriations Committee and sponsored by Ralph Regula, a Democratic congressional representative from Ohio. A report filed by the Committee in July 2004 explains the need for an open access policy (emphasis mine):

The Committee is very concerned that there is insufficient public access to reports and data resulting from NIH-funded research. This situation, which has been exacerbated by the dramatic rise in scientific journal subscription prices, is contrary to the best interests of the U.S. taxpayers who paid for this research. The Committee is aware of a proposal to make the complete text of articles and supplemental materials generated by NIH-funded research available on PubMed Central (PMC), the digital library maintained by the National Library of Medicine (NLM).

The problem of subscription rates for scholarly journals and the public interest argument come directly from open access rhetoric, including positions taken by members of the CCCC Intellectual Property Caucus. Arguing from the taxpayers’ interest in this context also sets an important precedent for government-funded research in other disciplines. It is unclear exactly why such an open access policy would originate in research in the health sciences, but one obvious speculation is the need, from a public health standpoint, to share research results quickly and inexpensively in the service of eradicating chronic conditions and infectious disease. Another is the relationship between researchers in the health sciences and pharmaceutical companies, which can be complex and necessitate a distancing move and a claim of the research by the public. The July 2004 report goes on to recommend:

The Committee supports this proposal and recommends that NIH develop a policy, to apply from FY 2005 forward, requiring that a complete electronic copy of any manuscript reporting work supported by NIH grants or contracts be provided to PMC upon acceptance of the manuscript for publication in any scientific journal listed in the NLM’s PubMed directory.

The proposed policy continued to gain ground, and in February of 2005, the NIH issued a report announcing details of the policy. They gave the following reasons as an explanation of the need for an open access initiative (“Policy on Enhancing Public Access”):

The Policy is intended to: 1) create a stable archive of peer-reviewed research publications resulting from NIH-funded research to ensure the permanent preservation of these vital published research findings; 2) secure a searchable compendium of these peer-reviewed research publications that NIH and its awardees can use to manage more efficiently and to understand better their research portfolios, monitor scientific productivity, and ultimately, help set research priorities; and 3) make published results of NIH-funded research more readily accessible to the public, health care providers, educators, and scientists.”

These reasons demonstrate the potential of an open access repository, especially an organized and searchable one, to provide an aerial view of the history and evolution of a discipline for any interested reader. In rhetoric and composition, a similar (though not open access) effort is Collin Brooke and Derek Mueller’s transformation of CCC Online into a dynamic, categorized, searchable archive.

In addition to laying out the intentions of the policy, the February 2005 report addressed several objections to it, including its perceived incompatibility with copyright law and its conflict with the market interest, particularly that of journal publishers. The NIH responded to these criticisms by citing the government purpose license, which applies generally to work by government contractors and allows government agencies some rights to copyrighted or patented work. They also pointed out one of the policy’s provisions, which states that authors may wait up to twelve months to post their articles to PubMed Central. The holding period is a concession for journal publishers to address the objection that they may lose subscriptions as a result of the policy.

Starting in 2005, per the Appropriation Committee’s recommendation, recipients of NIH funding were encouraged — but not required — to submit their publications to PubMed Central, a government repository of open-access medical research publications. According to Peter Suber, a senior researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC),  compliance rates were low under the voluntary system: in February 2006, the rate was below 4% (“NIH FAQ”). Throughout 2006 and most of 2007, the House and the Senate argued over specific matters related to language in the bill and budgetary concerns, as  PubMed Central is part of the NIH budget, and the costs rise with the number of submissions and the heft of repository use (“SPARC Open Access Newsletter, August 2007”). After passing in the House and the Senate, President Bush signed the open access policy into law on December 26, 2007, the language of which states:

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

While open access advocates have expressed disappointment that the “embargo period” is not shorter than twelve months, most agree that the NIH’s policy is progressive and moves research in general closer to the public interest. The policy will help researchers in the health sciences share their research on a global scale and will, ideally, enable innovation. It will go into effect on April 7, 2008.

Implications for Research in Other Fields, Including Rhetoric and Composition

Rhetoric and composition studies are not fields that are historically well funded by government agencies such as NIH (a possible exception being technical communication), but the NIH Open Access Mandate, with its driving argument as the issue of fairness and the public interest – the public funded it, so the public should have access to it – has two key implications for research in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, including rhetoric and composition:

1. Other government funding organizations (National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Dept. of Ed.) may decide to implement similar policies. Open access advocacy will be necessary for this effort, and publishers will lobby against it, but a precedent has been set nonetheless. The Alliance for Taxpayer Access, an alliance of 84 different libraries and advocacy groups for sufferers of specific diseases such as cystic fibrosis and AIDS, will continue with SPARC to push for open access to all government-funded research. I recommend that members of the CCCC IP Caucus create awareness of this organization on our individual campuses and encourage our libraries to join the ATA.
     
2. This policy may encourage similar policies at the state or university level, such as ScholarWorks at the University of Kansas. Faculty at the University of Kansas, starting in March 2005, have been encouraged to submit their research to ScholarWorks on the grounds that doing so will increase its visibility and cause it to be cited more often, and administration at KU has provided faculty with language to use when requesting publishers’ permission to post work to ScholarWorks (“Resolution on Access”). The University of California system and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also have such repositories.

Works Cited

Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research. http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-05-022.html

Public Access Frequently Asked Questions. http://publicaccess.nih.gov/FAQ.htm

Suber, Peter. “NIH Public-Access Policy Frequently Asked Questions.”  http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm

Suber, Peter. “OA mandate at NIH now law.” http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/12/oa-mandate-at-nih-now-law.html

Suber, Peter. “Welcome to the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #112.” 2 Aug 2007. 6 Feb 2008.  http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-07.htm#nih

Suber, Peter. “Welcome to the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #115.” 2 Nov 2007. 6 Feb 2008.  http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/11-02-07.htm#nih

Suber, Peter. “Welcome to the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #116 .” 2 Dec 2007. 6 Feb 2008.  http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/12-02-07.htm

KU: About KU ScholarWorks. http://www2.ku.edu/~scholar/ 6 Feb 2008

Resolution on Access to Scholarly Information Passed by the KU University Council. http://www2.ku.edu/~scholar/docs/ScholarlyInformationResolution.pdf

PubMed Central Homepage. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ 6 Feb 2008

House Report 108-636 – DEPARTMENTS OF LABOR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, AND EDUCATION, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATION BILL, 2005. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/?&db_id=cp108&r_n=hr636.108&sel=TOC_338641 6 Feb 2008.

Kim Dian Gainer, Radford University

Overview

The out-of-court settlement of two suits against a Google book indexing project is an example of the negotiations underway between copyright owners and new media in the absence of clearly defined legislative standards and judicial precedents.  Google claims that the indexing project did not violate provisions of fair use; copyright holders claim that the project did.  With the settlement, the question of whether such indexing was or was not fair use has been left unresolved.

Background

Google’s own account of its book indexing project traces the idea back to 1996, when, as graduate students, Google’s co-founders worked on a project funded by the Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project. The first concrete steps toward the project’s realization, however, date to 2002, when Google staff experimented with digitizing books and visited libraries where scanning projects were underway. Work on technical issues continued throughout 2003.  Then, in 2004, Google entered into an agreement with Oxford University’s Bodleian library to digitize its collection of nineteenth-century books.  These volumes were of course in the public domain.  Subsequent to this agreement, which was the foundation of the “Library Project”, Google entered into arrangements with research libraries at four additional institutions: Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and the New York Public Library.  Collectively, they offered access to fifteen million books (History of Google Book Search, 2009).  Significantly, not all these volumes were in the public domain.  While Harvard made available for scanning only out-of-copyright books, other libraries provided access to their entire collections (Hafner, 2005).

While negotiating with libraries, Google had also been working with publishers in order to offer a book indexing service called “Google Print”. By the end of 2004, Google had reached agreements with such publishers as Blackwell, Houghton Mifflin, Hyperion, McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Penguin, and Perseus, as well as with Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, the University of Chicago Press, and Princeton University Press (History of Google Book Search, 2009).  However, in spite of the willingness of these publishers to participate in Google Print, the separate Library Project drew protests from authors and publishers who objected to the scanning of copyrighted books without permission from the copyright holders.  In the case of books not in the public domain, searches would result in the display of “snippets”, the verbal equivalent of the thumbnails returned by Google image searches.  To generate these snippets, however, Google was scanning entire texts.  Although Google maintained that digitizing entire texts for the purpose of indexing was a fair use under copyright law, in the face of protests in 2005 it did briefly suspend the scanning of copyrighted books in order to allow for an opt-out procedure: for the space of three months, publishers could submit lists of books that were not to be scanned.  Absent notification that the opt-out was being invoked, the book would be digitized (Band, 2006, p. 2).  Some copyright holders felt that this opt-out provision was inadequate to protect their rights, and in September and October of 2005, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers filed separate suits against Google in an attempt to bring the Library Project to a halt on the grounds that the digitization of entire books was inconsistent with the principle of fair use.

Settlement

Settlement of all litigation was announced in October of 2008, and the terms of the settlement were made public in a lengthy document (Google Book Settlement, 2008) that specifies the conditions under which Google may continue to scan and provide access, in full or in part, to three categories of books published before January 5, 2009: (1) in-copyright and in-print, (2) in-copyright but out-of-print, and (3) out-of-copyright.  For the first category, the settlement protects the ownership rights of copyright holders by blocking access to the texts while providing a mechanism for purchasing electronic access (“No Preview Available”).  For the second category, the settlement protects the ownership rights of copyright holders by allowing the reader to view short passages while also permitting the purchase of electronic access to the full text (“Snippet View”).  For the last category, that of books in the public domain, Google will provide free online access to entire books, as it had been doing before the lawsuits were filed (“Full View”) (The Future of Google Book Search, 2009; Google Books Library Project, 2009; New Chapter for Google Book Search, 2008).

The settlement requires Google to pay $ 125 million for copyrighted books it has already scanned.  Google is also required to bear that cost of establishing and maintaining a Book Rights Registry that will receive and distribute future payments.  These costs, however, might have been dwarfed by the penalties that Google could have faced if a court had ruled against Google and adjudged it to have infringed authors’ and publishers’ copyrights.  Moreover, the payments presumably will be offset by the fact that Google will henceforth be entitled to thirty-seven percent of the fees that consumers will be charged for digital access to copyrighted books. In addition, Google may charge publishers for listing these books.  Google may also profit from subscriptions purchased by libraries for access to the entire database of scanned books, including books under copyright.  Expenses may also be recouped by the placement of advertisements on preview pages, a revenue stream that is already part of Google’s business model (Helft & Rich, 2008; Quint, 2008; Rich, 2009; Snyder, 2008). 

Implications for Authors and Publishers

With the settlement, Google is authorized to display more substantial portions of books that are under copyright but out of print.  These books make up the majority of the books that will be searchable via Google Book search.  Of the first seven million books that Google scanned, five million were under copyright yet out of print (Rich, 2009).  Previously, Google could display three snippets of each such book.  Under the settlement, if a copyrighted book is out of print, Google may display, cumulatively, up to twenty percent of the entire text.  Additional restrictions apply depending on the nature of the text.  For example, Google will block the display of the final pages of a work of fiction (Band, 2008, pp. 4-5).

Even though Google will be displaying larger portions of books that are under copyright but out of print, the copyright holders will have little cause to complain.  Previously, such orphan books generated no revenue for the copyright holders.  Now, whenever a reader pays to access online the full text of an orphaned book, a portion of that payment will be deposited in the Book Rights Registry, and those payments will be passed on to the author or publisher who holds the copyright via a mechanism similar to that by which songwriters are recompensed when their melodies are played on the radio.  In effect, Google will advertise and market these books.  Google will take its thirty-seven percent cut, but no money would have been forthcoming at all had it not been for the inclusion of the out-of-print book in Google’s database.

The situation is somewhat different in the case of copyrighted books that are in print.  As in the case of orphan works, Google had previously provided snippets.  Now readers will no longer see portions of the pages that contain their search terms.  Instead, they will be able to view title pages and other sections, such as the index and table of contents, that may help them determine whether to seek further access—either online or bricks and mortar—to the books in which their search terms appear (Band, 2008, p. 5).  It remains to be seen whether any significant sales will accrue to publishers as a result of these displays.  If readers do elect to pay for online access, Google will, again, receive thirty-seven percent of the payment.

Implications for the Public

Even before the settlement, via Google’s Library Project readers were able to locate and access, without charge,the full texts of books in the public domain.  With the settlement, readers can also be sure of locating copyrighted books that may be relevant to their search.  In the case of books that are under copyright but out of print, readers will have access, at no charge, to a limited number of pages that contain or are adjacent to their search term.  They may also purchase full online access to these orphaned books.   The iPod generation, accustomed to accessing media online, may in this fashion give a ‘second life’ to some books whose sales were not sufficient to warrant shelf space in bricks and mortar bookstores.  In the case of copyrighted books that are in print, readers may also purchase online access, but without first sampling any of the pages of the book.

Implications for Educators and Students

A provision in the settlement mandates that Google provide upon request free “Public Access Service” to one terminal in each separate building in each and every public library system in the United States.  This Public Access Service will allow patrons to read books that are under copyright but not in print.  Patrons may not electronically copy or annotate these books, but they may print pages for a per sheet fee (Band, 2008, pgs. 7-8).  Educators may wish to make certain that the public libraries in their communities are aware of this provision, as Google is not required to notify libraries of this service.  In addition, colleges and universities—but not primary, middle, or high schools—may request Public Access Service: one access point per 4,000 students at institutions classified as Associate Colleges and one access point per 10,000 students at other institutions of higher education (Band, 2008, pgs. 7-8).  For both public libraries and institutions of higher education, additional Institutional Subscriptions are available for a fee.  Such subscriptions allow patrons to electronically annotate books, to print up to twenty pages of a book at a time, as well as to copy and paste up to four consecutive pages at a time.  Moreover, books in the Institutional Subscription Database can be made available via e-reserves or as part of course management systems, providing that the intended users would be authorized to use the Institutional Subscription itself (Band, 2008, pgs. 8-9).

Reactions to the Settlement

Reactions to the settlement ranged widely.  Barbara Quint, columnist for Information Today, lauded the settlement for, among other achievements, addressing the problem of orphan works (Quint, 2008).  Lawrence Lessig, author of Free Culture, also was pleased with the settlement’s approach to orphan works, which he felt was likely to be a better solution to that problem than the Orphan Works legislationproposed in Congress.  Overall, he felt that the settlement was better than a win would have been:

The Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers have settled for terms that will assure greater access to these materials than would have been the case had Google prevailed. Under the agreement, 20% of any work not opting out will be available freely; full access can be purchased for a fee. That secures more access for this class of out-of-print but presumptively-under-copyright works than Google was initially proposing. And as this constitutes up to 75% of the books in the libraries to be scanned, that is hugely important and good. (Lessig, 2008)

Lessig was also pleased that no court attempted to determine fair use in this case.  The former plaintiffs, he wrote,

are clear that they still don’t agree with Google’s views about “fair use.” But this agreement gives the public (and authors) more than what “fair use” would have permitted. That leaves “fair use” as it is, and gives the spread of knowledge more that it would have had. (Lessig, 2008)

Other analysts were not as sanguine as Lessig.  Even before the settlement, some libraries had refused to partner with Google because of the conditions that the giant company had placed upon the project (Hafner, 2007).  Now, in the wake of the settlement, some critics wondered whether such a powerful player as Google might come to monopolize a potentially important new system for the delivery of virtual books (Cohen, 2009).  Microsoft had tried to start its own program of book digitization but, unable to complete with Google, had abandoned its effort in May of 2008 (Helft, 2008).  Wrote Robert Darnton, head librarian at Harvard, one of the early participants in the Library Project,

… Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly—a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information. Google has no serious competitors… Google alone has the wealth to digitize on a massive scale. And having settled with the authors and publishers, it can exploit its financial power from within a protective legal barrier; for the class action suit covers the entire class of authors and publishers. No new entrepreneurs will be able to digitize books within that fenced-off territory, even if they could afford it, because they would have to fight the copyright battles all over again. (Darnton, 2009)

There is a non-exclusivity proviso included in the settlement so that libraries (there are now many more than the original five) may make their collections available for scanning to other companies or entities (Band, 2008, p. 19).  Moreover, Google may have benign intentionsunder its current leadership.  Nevertheless, it has cornered the market on book digitization, and this concerns some onlookers.  On the other hand, Google has succeeded in negotiating a space within which new products can be brought to the market while respecting copyright, and it is arguable that only a gorilla the size of Google would have had the pocketbooks and the savvy to force media conglomerates to accommodate its view of “fair use.” 

Works Cited

Band, J.  (2006, Jan.).  The Google Library Project: The Copyright Debate.   Office for Information Technology Brief.  American Library Association.  Retrieved Feb. 14, 2009 from

_____.  (2008, Nov. 13).  A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries and Google Library Project settlement.  American Library Association.  Retrieved Feb. 14, 2009 from http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/google-settlement-13nov08.pdf

Cohen, N.  (2009,Feb. 1).  Some Fear Google’s Power in Digital Books.  The New York Times.  Retrieved February 14, 2009 from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/technology/internet/02link.html?scp=6&sq=google%20book%20search&st=cse

Darnton, R.  (2009, Feb. 12).  Google and the Future of Books.  The New York Review of Books.  Retrieved Feb. 14, 2009 from http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22281

The Future of Google Book Search: Our Groundbreaking Agreement with Authors and Publishers.  (2009).  Google Book Search Settlement Agreement.  Retrieved Feb. 14, 2009 from http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/#1

Google Book Settlement.  (2008).  Retrieved Feb. 14, 2009 from http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/r/view_settlement_agreement

Google Books Library Project: An Enhanced Card Catalog of the World’s Books.  (2009).  Google Book Search.  Retrieved Feb. 14, 2009 from http://books.google.com/googlebooks/library.html

Hafner, K.  (2005 Nov. 21).  At Harvard, a Man, a Plan and a Scanner.  The New York Times.  Retrieved February 14, 2009 from http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/21/business/21harvard.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=google%20book%20search&st=cse

_____.  (2007 Oct. 22).  Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web.  The New York Times.  Retrieved February 14, 2009 from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/technology/22library.html?scp=11&sq=google%20book%20search&st=cse

Helft, M.  (2008 May 24).  Microsoft Will Shut Down Book Search Program.  The New York Times.  Retrieved February 14, 2009 from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/technology/24soft.html?scp=16&sq=google%20book%20search&st=cse  

Helft, M., and Rich, M.  (2008 Oct. 28).  Google Settles Suit over Book-Scanning.  The New York Times.  14 February 2009 <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/technology/internet/29google.html?scp=14&sq=google%20book%20search&st=cse

History of Google Book Search.  (2009).  About Google Book Search.  Retrieved February 14, 2009 from http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/history.html

Lessig, L.  (2008, Oct. 29).  On the Google Book Search Agreement.  Lessig2.0: Blog.  Retrieved Feb. 14, 2009 from http://www.lessig.org/blog/2008/10/on_the_google_book_search_agre.html

Manuel, K.M.  (2009, Feb. 5).  “The Google Library Project: Is Digitization for Purposes of  Online Indexing Fair Use under Copyright Law.”  Congressional Research Service.   Open CRS: Congressional Research Reports for the People.  Retrieved March 23, 2009  from http://opencrs.com/document/R40194

New Chapter for Google Book Search.(2008 Oct. 28).  The Official Google Blog.  Retrieved February 14, 2009 from http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-chapter-for-google-book-search.html

Quint, B.  (2008, Nov. 3).  The Google Book Search Settlement: ‘The Devil’s in the Details’.  Information Today.  Retrieved Feb. 14, 2009 from file:///H:/Synchronize/Intellectual%20Property/Devil%20in%20Details.htm

Rich, M. (2009 Jan. 4). Google Hopes to Open a Trove of Little-Seen Books. The New York Times.  Retrieved February 14, 2009 from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/technology/internet/05google.html

Snyder, C.  (2008 October 28).  Google Settles Book-Scan Lawsuit, Everybody Wins.  Epicenter.  Wired blog network.  Retrieved February 14, 2009 from http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/10/google-settles.html

For additional sources on Google Book Search and the Settlement, see

Bailey, C.W., Jr. (2008, Dec. 9).  Google Book Search Bibliography.  Intellectual Property.  Retrieved Feb. 14, 2009 from file:///H:/Synchronize/Intellectual%20Property/gbsb.htm

Slocum, M.  (2008, Oct. 30).  Reaction to Google Book Search Settlement.  Tools of Change for Publishing.  Retrieved Feb. 14, 2009 from file:///H:/Synchronize/Intellectual%20Property/reaction-to-google-book-search.html

Wendy Warren Austin, Ph.D., Edinboro University of Pennsylvania

OVERVIEW

In 1996, John M. Barrie founded iParadigms, LLC, and began marketing Turnitin.com, a plagiarism detection service (PDS) that has since become the most widely adopted PDS at many universities and high schools. In 2003 and again in 2005, two Canadian college students refused to submit their student work to the Turnitin database through their McGill University classes that mandated using the service. In both cases, the McGill University Senate decided in favor of each student’s right to have their papers graded without running them through the Turnitin database. Until September 2006, no students in U.S. schools and universities had publicly objected to having their papers submitted to the database on a mandatory basis. However, that changed when a number of students at McLean High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, circulated a petition objecting to having their student papers uploaded to the school’s newly adopted Turnitin.com.  Seven students formed the Committee for Students’ Rights, rounding up 1,190 student signatures.  Their petition simply requested that the school remove the mandate to submit their papers and allow an opt-out option.

The students contacted a reporter at The Washington Post who wrote a front-page article called “Students Rebel Against Database Designed to Thwart Plagiarists,” (Glod, 2006) which was subsequently circulated via the Washington Post newswire to many papers, such as the Seattle Times. Immediately, bloggers also began writing about and discussing this situation on such blogs as The Wired Campus from Chronicle for Higher Education (Read, 2006), PBS.org (Carvin, 2006) and Ed-Tech Insider (Hoffman, 2006). Also, one of the students who helped organize the Committee for Students’ Rights, Ben Donovan, appeared on the Today Show.

After students presented their petition to school officials, McLean High School decided to change its policy to exclude juniors and seniors from the mandate, with plans to reinstate it after those two cohorts graduated. While the students’ list of reasons against Turnitin.com did include the school’s mandatory application of it for all student papers, this was certainly not the only one. Their primary issues with Turnitin.com, include:

1. The presumption of guilt—The idea of “guilty until proven innocent” prevails in this model of plagiarism detection, especially when the submission of papers is deemed as mandatory, not voluntary.
2. The violation of a students’ privacy—Even though the school district claims the submissions are anonymous, by virtue of the password authentication process through an off-site server, students still have to input their email addresses and names.
3. The violation of intellectual property laws—Mandatory submission of student papers helps build Turnitin.com’s database without any monetary compensation. Although licensing fees are paid for professional articles that are contained within the database, students’ papers are obtained with no compensation even though they add considerably to the products’ profitability. Furthermore, although these high school students digitally sign a “consent” form as they have their papers submitted, they are in fact “signing” these consents under duress, i.e., under penalty of getting a zero, and by virtue of their status as minors, lack capacity to enter into a binding contract.

DEVELOPMENTS

On October 16, John Barrie attended a McLean High School Parent Teacher Student Association (PTSA) meeting to address the Turnitin.com concerns, although from student and parent reports, he did not do so satisfactorily, instead saying things like “[I]f Harvard, Yale, and other Ivy League schools use it, it certainly can’t be bad,” and denying that there were any intellectual property issues involved with the use of his product. In fact, at that time, most (or all) of the Ivy League Schools had not adopted Turnitin because they felt it created a culture of mistrust. Soon after this date, however, Harvard became the first Ivy League school to announce that they were going to adopt Turnitin, albeit on a pilot basis. None of the other schools has yet adopted the service.

A local attorney, Robert Vanderhye, offered to represent the McLean Committee for Student Rights and subsequently sent a detailed letter dated November 15, 2006, to John Barrie requesting that if/when students submitted any of their papers to Turnitin.com, Barrie would agree to remove those student papers from its database within a week of the paper’s submittal. If they would not, Vanderhye’s clients would sue iParadigms. The attorney received a phone call from iParadigms in response to the letter, indicating they were not going to respond to the request. Vanderhye’s clients then filed suit in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, for copyright infringement. Barrie’s company promptly followed up the request with a countersuit against the high school student committee, but when a reporter from the Washington Post called Barrie to seek information about this countersuit, he replied, “What suit?” (Donovan, 2007). It was found that the countersuit was actually dismissed on December 20.

Back in McLean High School, the PTSA Executive Board asked the principal for an update on the Turnitin situation. In a letter dated December 21, 2006, Principal Paul Wardinski reported to them that:

Mr. Vanderhye sent several letters threatening to bring a lawsuit for damages and injunctive relief against Turnitin if the company did not acquiesce in Mr. Vanderhye’s legal interpretation, and if it did not withdraw the students’ papers from the Turnitin database.

From the correspondence we have seen, it appears that Turnitin engaged in settlement discussions with Mr. Vanderhye and the Committee and proposed a technical solution to the school’s primary concern. . .

The letter, which is posted on a site called DontTurnItIn.com that contains most of the pertinent data related to this situation, goes into more depth (Wardinski, 2006), but, according to a letter written in response to Wardinski’s, (Donovan, Bouchard, Gayer, and Kaylor, 2007) much of the information contained in it was misleading or inaccurate. At another McLean High School PTSA meeting in early 2007, another representative from the school district came to address more questions the two letters had raised, scolding the parents for harping on the issue, and dismissing their concerns by saying that they shouldn’t get upset at the principal’s letter because he didn’t even write it himself. Many of the parents were shocked at this statement because “the whole debate is about academic integrity and here he is saying the writer of the first letter didn’t even write it himself and he’s telling us we shouldn’t worry about the whole issue” (personal communication, Rose Donovan, March 17, 2007).

A major help to anyone wanting to find out more details about this situation is a very nicely done web site that one or more of the parents of the students involved with the Committee on Students’ Rights helped establish called dontturnitin.com. In addition to the “Welcome” page as a home page showing an overview of the situation, the site features pages that contain “Links and Other Information,” “What is turnitin.com?,” “Primary Issues,” and “How You Can Help.” The “Links” page is especially useful for its breakdown into documents and links marked “From the Students’ Perspective,” “From the McLean High School Administration and PTSA,” “From the Press,” “From Parents and Counsel,” From turnitin.com,” and “Additional Links about turnitin.com.”

RELATED EVENTS and DISCUSSIONS

About the same time that all this was going on, starting in mid-September, a small number of members from the CCCC-IP Caucus was finalizing its statement regarding recommendations about academic integrity and the use of plagiarism detection services, a statement that had been presented to the Caucus earlier that year in draft form at the 2006 CCCC. The statement is posted online at http://culturecat.net/files/CCCC-IPpositionstatementDraft.pdf as a link connected to the CCCC-IP blog.

At Grand Valley State University, Charlie Lowe, and two other writing professors developed a statement for their faculty, outlining concerns they had with the adoption of turnitin technology at GVSU. Brock Read’s article of  Sept. 19 in Chronicle of Higher Education and in The Wired Campus blog, “The Pros and Cons of Turnitin” mentions their statement, as well as a lengthy blog entry and comments with responses section, starting with a post by Michael Bruton, who works for iParadigms helping schools install and implement Turnitin.com. This thread was one of the most open discussion forums to date between compositionists and PDSs advocates. The School Library Journal reported (Oleck, 2006) that the University of Kansas at Lawrence was not renewing their subscription to Turnitin because of faculty’s negative reactions and IP concerns.

At George Mason University, the journal Inventio: Creative Thinking about Learning and Teaching published a feature webtext article in their Fall 2006 issue called “(Mis)Trusting Technology that Polices Integrity: A Critical Assessment of Turnitin.com” (Donnelly, et. al, 2006).  The authors explore many of the same issues about consent and intellectual property that concern the students and parents at McLean High School.

A few more dubious contributions to the McLean High School situation and issues surrounding it include an unsigned article on a site called EssayFraud.org dated October 20, 2006 called “Guilty Until Proven Innocent: The Well-Known Secret about Turnitin.com.” At almost all the blog sites that mentioned these issues about this time or a little after, someone named Dan pointed out this article and its link to others. It may or may not be a coincidence that Dan is the name of one of the students on the Committee for Students’ Rights, but the lack of attribution on the EssayFraud.org page anywhere makes it difficult to include within a serious bibliography on the subject. Nevertheless, the article is pretty well researched.

This spring, in the online version of BusinessWeek, Doug MacMillan’s article (2007) mentioned a backlash against Turnitin.com from McLean High School students, citing privacy and intellectual property concerns. The CCCC-IP and our statement addressing plagiarism detection services were mentioned in the article, along with a (mis)quote from Michael Day, which prompted him to write a public apology on the CCCC-IP blog.  If journalists can eventually translate our viewpoints translated clearly and correctly in the mainstream press, we might be better able to maintain momentum and visibility. Even so, it’s possible that “the only bad publicity is no publicity.”

IMPLICATIONS FOR COMPOSITIONISTS AND RESEARCHERS

Being able to articulate our positions in sound-bite or quote-tidbit formats might be useful in the future when or if we are asked by the press to comment on current events such as these. We must be ready to anticipate journalists’ needs and their impossibly speeded-up timetables, or else they will seek out someone else who may offer a different viewpoint than ours.

Other more direct and easy-to-control avenues for our opinions are in blog discussions and  statements we author at our schools. As noted in the citations below, all three of the blogs cited above in the second paragraph posted entries the same morning the Washington Post article came out, and time was of the essence in posting blog entries and comments as all these events were taking place. Charlie Lowe, Karen Lunsford, and others urged members of the CCCC-IP listserv to jump in to the discussions with both feet. “Now would be a great time to join these conversations, post on your own blogs, send in materials to discussion lists, etc. The PDS issue is particularly important for the Caucus, as we have a document regarding PDSs currently posted for your final review…” urged Karen Lunsford in an email message on Sept. 21, 2006. So, we have to be poised to respond quickly and well to speak to these issues on any and all venues, both globally and locally. Charlie Lowe suggested we could be reaching “critical mass” as we make these voices heard. Journalists read these blogs and comments as well as scour the Internet for pertinent materials we could post, so we should take advantage of these writing situations.

Rose Donovan, mother of one of the most vocal members of the Committee for Students’ Rights at McLean High School, asked beseechingly one of the most important questions that might help bolster our claims: is there any research out there on plagiarism or plagiarists or use of plagiarism detection services vs. teaching to prevent plagiarism (i.e. instead of deterring with technology)? James Purdy’s (2005) article in Pedagogy, “Calling Off the Hounds: Technology and Visibility of Plagiarism”  is one such example of research involving PDSs, but more research needs to be done. The CCCC-IP Statement urges compositionists to:

[C]onduct empirical studies to explore the effects of available
strategies—including PDSs, pedagogy, and honor codes—on students’ ethical writing from sources. Such studies need to explore whether or how PDSs, pedagogy, and honor codes produce results such as these:

• Students’ proficiency and confidence as writers;
• Students’ understanding of what they can gain from completing their writing assignments;
• Students’ sense of investment in and commitment to doing their own writing;
• Students’ understanding of what constitutes plagiarism and ethical writing in a variety of contexts;
• Students’ commitment to establishing a community of integrity and mutual trust;
• Reduced incidence of cheating and fraud.

These research imperatives need to be explored more urgently than ever. Meanwhile, we need to stay alert to what is happening around us and ready to act. This has been an exciting year; 2007 may hold even more opportunities.

RELEVANT SOURCES

Bruton, Michael (2006, Sept. 15). Turnitin’s response to recent posts concerning proper pedagogy. Kairos News. Retrieved October 16, 2006 from http://kairosnews.org.

CCCC-IP Caucus recommendations regarding academic integrity and the use of plagiarism detection services (2007, March). Caucus on Intellectual Property and Composition/Communication Studies. Retrieved March 17, 2007 from http://culturecat.net/files/CCCC-IPpositionstatementDraft.pdf.

Carvin, Andy. (2006, Sept. 22). The politics of plagiarism detection services. Learning.now. PBS Teachers. Retrieved March 17, 2007 from http://www.pbs.org/teachers/learning.now/.

Donnelly, Michael, et al. (2006, Fall). (Mis)trusting technology that polices integrity: A critical assessment of Turnitin.com. Inventio, 8(1). Retrieved February 11, 2007 from http://www.doit.gmu.edu/inventio/issues/Fall_2006/Donnelly_1.html.

dontturnitin.com. (2007). A forum for McLean High School parents & students. Retrieved February 25, 2007 from http://www.dontturnitin.com/

Glod, Maria. (2006, Sept. 22). Students rebel against database designed to thwart plagiarists. [Electronic version]. Washington Post, p. A01.

Hoffman, Tom. (2006, Sept. 22). Turnitin vs. student intellectual property rights. Ed-Tech Insider. Retrieved March 17, 2007 from http://www.eschoolnews.com/eti/index.php.

MacMillan, Douglas. (2007, March 13). Looking over Turnitin’s shoulder. BusinessWeek.com Retrieved March 13, 2007 from http://www.businessweek.com/print/technology/content/mar2007/tc20070313.htm

Oleck, Joan. (2006, Oct. 4). Students claim Turnitin violates intellectual property rights. School Library Journal. Retrieved March 17, 2007 from http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6377874.html.

Purdy, James. (2005). Calling off the hounds: Technology and the visibility of plagiarism. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture,5 (2), 275-295.

Read, Brock. (2006, Sept. 22). Taking a hard line on Turnitin. The Wired Campus. Retrieved March 17, 2007 from http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/.

The well-known secret about Turnitin.com. (2006, Oct. 20). EssayFraud.org. Retrieved March 17, 2007 from http://www.essayfraud.org/turnitin_john_barrie.html

Traci A. Zimmerman (Pipkins), James Madison University

In March 2007, two students at McLean High School in McLean, Virginia along with two students at Desert Vista High School in Phoenix, Arizona filed a lawsuit against Turnitin.com, a California company hired by their respective schools to aid in the fight against plagiarism.  Turnitin.com (“turn it in”) is a for-profit service used by over 6,000 academic institutions in 90 countries (1).  According to the Turnitin.com website:

iParadigms, the company behind Turnitin got its start in 1996, when a group of researchers at UC Berkeley created a series of computer programs to monitor the recycling of research papers in their large undergraduate classes. Encouraged by a high level of interest from their peers, the researchers teamed with a group of teachers, mathematicians, and computer scientists to form Plagiarism.org, the world’s first internet-based plagiarism detection service.  In the years since, Plagiarism.org has continued to grow and evolve, and is now recognized around the world as Turnitin and iThenticate, the internet’s most widely used and trusted resources for preventing the spread of internet plagiarism. (5)

In the following brief report, I will describe the context and motivation for the 2007 lawsuit, the details and central points of debate surrounding the case, and the implications that the case has for the rhetoric and composition classroom.  It will be impossible in such short space to provide the kind of depth and breadth of research that a subject like this demands; for that reason, I have provided an additional list of references which should serve as a solid starting point for further inquiry.

The Case Against Turnitin.com

Though the March 2007 filing is the first lawsuit in the United States to be brought against Turnitin, it is not the first time students have expressed concern with the plagiarism detection software.  In 2003 and 2005, two McGill University students refused to submit their work to the Turnitin database in classes that mandated their using the service (2).  In at least one of the cases, the student received failing grades for his work just because he refused to submit his assignments to Turnitin. Ultimately, the McGill University Senate decided “in favor of each student’s right to have their papers graded without running them through the Turnitin database” (2). 

The events that led up to the eventual filing of the lawsuit in March 2007 began in September of 2006, when a group of students at McLean High School circulated a petition to oppose the mandatory submission of their work to a newly adopted Turnitin.com (2).  The petition, which garnered 1,190 student signatures of the approximately 1800 students that attend the school, requested that the mandate to submit work to Turnitin be removed and that an “opt-out” option be allowed (2).  School officials responded to the petition by easing (but not removing) the mandate: instead of having all students in all grades submit their work to Turnitin, only 9th and 10th grade English and social studies classes would be required  to use the service.  Ultimately, this was no solution at all, since it meant that the current policy would be changed to exclude junior and seniors from the mandate only temporarily; after those two groups graduated, the policy would be reinstated, offering a kind of “grandfather clause” to the older students, but no consolation to those students who would come after.

In October of 2006, Dr. John Barrie, the President and CEO of iParadigms attended a McLean High School Parent Teacher Student Association (PTSA) meeting to address the growing Turnitin concerns (2).  According to many reports, this meeting was wholly unsuccessful; Barrie tended to defend rather than explain his product, saying things like “if Harvard, Yale, and other Ivy League schools use it, it certainly can’t be bad” though at the time Barrie made the claim, none of the Ivy Leagues had adopted Turnitin (2).  Harvard would become the first Ivy to adopt the service, and even then, only on a pilot basis (2).  But it would not be the last.  When Princeton announced later that same year that they “had no intention of using Turnitin.com,” the student newspaper contacted Barrie for a comment.  He had one: “Princeton is soft on cheating” (3).  Brock Read, who writes about Barrie’s zealous attack on Princeton as an “anti-cheating” crusader, admits that

Mr. Barrie’s vehemance may have made him a persona non grata at Princeton, but it has helped him persuade instructors at more than 8,000 high schools and colleges – including two of Princeton’s Ivy League rivals, Harvard and Columbia, the University of California system, and the University of Oxford, in England – to use his service.  Last year [2007], professors and teachers submitted a whopping 30 million papers from their students to Turnitin. (emphasis mine) (3)

Ironically, the very reasons that propel Turnitin’s success are the same reasons that make McLean High School parents and students wary of the service: the sheer size of the database.  As he worked out the earliest versions of what would become Turnitin.com, Barrie knew that the strength of the service would lie in its numbers; Turnitin would only succeed if it were built on “a database so massive that it creates a deterrent.” (3)  On their comprehensive and informative website “dontturnitin.com” (don’t turn it in), McLean parents and students certainly see the database as such a deterrent, noting as a “prohibitive factor” the fact that “original, intellectual work produced in a public school is being transferred to, archived by, and utilized for profit by a private company against the student’s wishes, but with the permission of the school administration” (6).  The fact that Turnitin uses these archived student papers to look for plagiarism in future submissions is what fuels the McLean lawsuit.  The four student plaintiffs allege that this practice constitutes copyright infringement and are asking for $900,000 in compensation for six papers that they claim were “added to Turnitin’s database against their will” (3).  Turnitin’s lawyers argue otherwise, claiming that the use of the papers fall under the “fair use” clause of the U.S. Copyright Act — the papers are neither “displayed [n]or distributed to anyone” and the students have to give their consent (by clicking “I agree”) before the paper is accepted by Turnitin.com  (qtd in 7).

Robert A. Vanderhye, a retired lawyer in Virginia who has taken on the student’s case pro bono, says that Turnitin “tarnishes its claim of fair use by redistributing papers in its database: Turnitin offers to send professors complete copies of works that it identifies as the sources of plagiarized material” (3).

The parents and students who created Dontturnitin.com agree that “cheating and plagiarism should never be tolerated in any academic or workplace setting” but go on to note that McLean High School has “a comprehensive honor code” in place that could possibly be “augmented” by Turnitin.com on a “voluntary” basis; however, the current system of using Turnitin (as a kind of punitive tool rather than a pedagogical one) seems more of a solution in search of a problem than anything else.  A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (February 29, 2008) echoes this concern:

When Mr. Barrie founded Turnitin, just over a decade ago, few professors had even thought about, let alone clamored for, plagiarism-detection software.  In essence, iParadigms has built a fast growing business out of almost nothing. (3)

Even Barrie himself agrees: “It’s safe to say that Turnitin is now a part of how education works” (3). 

Implications for the Rhetoric and Composition Classroom

On the surface, it might seem a salient fact that Dr. Barrie majored in (of all things) Rhetoric and Neurobiology while an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley (5).  In one of his later iterations as an entrepreneur and crusader in the area of plagiarism detection, he has become “a national leader and expert on the problem of plagiarism in education” (5).  But to whom?  The various blogs spawned by the McLean lawsuit, such as The Wired Campus from The Chronicle of Higher Education (September 22, 2006 and March 30, 2007) or Andy Carvin’s blog on PBS.org entitled “The Politics of Plagiarism Detection Services” (September 22, 2006), only complicate the issue further, as teacher, student, principal, and Jane Q. Citizen draw virtual lines in the sand about where the boundaries of creativity and plagiarism, teaching and totalitarianism begin and end.  Is Turnitin.com solely to blame?  Or should we look to those secondary schools, colleges, and universities that compel their students to submit to the service? 

The implications for the rhetoric and composition classroom can be separated into three main categories – two of which, “pedagogical” and “ethical” – are categories articulated brilliantly by Michael Donnelly in the introduction to “(Mis)Trusting Technology that Polices Integrity: A Critical Assessment of Turnitin.com.” (4)  I shall use his designations as well as add one additional category, “theoretical,” to sum up the main points of conflict. 

Pedagogical
In their statement on best practices entitled “Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism,” the WPA lists 18 “shared responsibilities” among students, faculty and administrators to address the problem of plagiarism.  None of them include or advocate the use of plagiarism-detection software.  When the WPA does mention “plagiarism detection services,” they do so with a word of caution, noting that “although such services may be tempting, they are not always reliable.  Furthermore, their availability should never be used to justify the avoidance of responsible teaching methods” (9). Instead they offer, as one of their “best practices,” the following advice:

Make the research process, and technology used for it, visible.  Ask your students to consider how various technologies – computers, fax machines, photocopiers, email – affect the way information is gathered and synthesized, and what effect these technologies may have on plagiarism. (9)

The CCCC-IP Caucus, in their “Recommendations Regarding Academic Integrity and the Use of Plagiarism Detection Services,” is even more forceful and focused in their recommendations against such services as Turnitin noting that

Use of Plagiarism Detection Services poses several compromises to academic integrity and effective teaching of which educators need to be aware before or if their institutions avail themselves of these technologies.  The CCCC-IP Caucus recommends that compositionists take a leadership role in educating their institutions about the limitations of these services and conduct more empirical research to understand better how these technological services affect student’s writing and the educational environment. (8)

It is this “educational environment” that seems most damaged by the inclusion of plagiarism detection services like Turnitin.  In reading through the numerous articles and blogs about the McLean lawsuit, I noticed the repetition of comments centered on the culture of mistrust and fear that is created when students are forced to use Turnitin.  The idea of “guilty until proven innocent” (2) prevails, and students are left to grapple with the uncomfortable assumptions that the use of Turnitin reveals: that students are cheaters who need to be policed.

“Plagiarism is not,” Michael Donnelly writes, “a simple matter of catching dishonorable students and prosecuting them” (4).  If anything, it should be more about understanding connections than it is about policing boundaries.  Yet I certainly recognize what Charlie Lowe calls “the culture of fear” that attends to plagiarism and its detection; even as I wrote this article, I worried, perhaps even more than usual, about proper attribution and citation.  This anxiety might be a way to connect to the concerns raised by the student lawsuit:  “Faculty might want to ask themselves,” Lowe says, “about how they would feel if their departments asked them to submit everything they wrote to a plagiarism detection service” (qtd in 3).

Theoretical
Rebecca Moore Howard keenly identifies the theoretical implications of plagiarism detection services on the composition classroom in her book Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators.  In it, she illustrates the ways in which these services stand to oversimplify and undermine our understandings of authorship, text, and reader.  She writes

The irony of [using] mechanical means for detecting plagiarism, especially as such means are enacted by computers, should not be overlooked.  Plagiarism-checking software would mechanize the monitoring of textual purity, excluding all but textual criteria.  Plagiarism-detection software excludes both authorial intention and reader interpretation  in the construction of authorship.  By automating textual purity, plagiarism-checking software naturalizes the increasingly embattled modern economy of authorship, even as the human factors that it elides would reveal that economy as a cultural arbitrary.  In the face of a revolution in authorship that rivals the introduction of the printing press, plagiarism-checking software would deploy digitized information technology to protect that which is threatened.  Instead of transforming the ways in which we think of reading and writing, this technology would freeze and reassert the notion of authorship in which writing is unitary, originary, proprietary, and linear, and in which the text is the locus and sole arbiter of meaning. (11)

Ethical
There are two main areas of ethical concern when plagiarism detection software is used in the composition classroom:  student privacy and student property.

Student Privacy
The school that compels its students to submit their work to Turnitin may also compel the violation of those students’ privacy.  In the case of the McLean High School lawsuit, students were told that their submissions were “anonymous,” but “by virtue of the password authentication process through an off-site server, students still have to input their email addresses and names” (2).  Also, as noted earlier, entire copies of student work are offered to professors should the work be deemed the source of plagiarized material.  

Student property
Dontturnitin.com calls the violation of Intellectual Property Laws “the most complicated of all the issues…perhaps the most egregious issue of all” (6).  And they are not alone in their thinking.  Michael Donnelly writes that plagiarism detection software like Turnitin “doesn’t merely infringe on [student] rights, it simply ignores them” (4).  Wendy Warren Austin further illustrates the point, arguing that

Mandatory submission of student papers helps build Turnitin.com’s database without any monetary compensation.  Although licensing fees are paid for professional articles that are contained within the database, students’ papers are obtained with no compensation though they add considerably to the product’s profitability.  Furthermore, although these high school students digitally sign a “consent” form as they have their papers submitted, they are in fact “signing” these consents under duress, i.e. under penalty of getting a zero, and by virtue of their status as minors, lack capacity to enter into a binding contract.

As Michael Donnelly soberly reminds us, this issue should be “even more pressing when faculty at colleges and universities across the country…are lobbying for better, clearer protection of their own Intellectual Property Rights” (4).  What might prove a more sobering reality is the most recent iteration of the McLean lawsuit: just last week, Judge Hilton issued an Order and Memorandum Opinion in which he grants summary judgment in favor of iParadigms (12). 

Works Cited

1. “McLean High School eases mandate that students submit essays to anti-plagiarism service.”  Legal Clips.  The National School Boards Association.  October 2006.  http://www.nsba.org/site/doc_cosa.asp?TRACKID=&DID=39406&CID=164

2. Austin, Wendy Warren.  “Virginia High School Students Rebel Against Mandatory Use of Turnitin.com.”  5 July 2007.  NCTE-CCCC.  /cccc/gov/committees/ip/127372.htm

3. Read, Brock.  “Anti-Cheating Crusader Vexes Some Professors: Software kingpin says using his product would cure plagiarism blight.”  The Chronicle of Higher Education.  29 February 2008.  http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i25/25a00101.htm

4. Donnelly, Michael et al.  “(Mis)Trusting Technology that Polices Integrity: A Critical Assessment of Turnitin.com.”  Inventio.  Fall 2006.  Issue 1, Volume 8.  http://www.doit.gmu.edu/inventio/issues/Fall_2006/Donnelly_print.html

5. Turnitin.com  http://www.turnitin.com/static/bios.html
 
6. Dontturnitin.com (Website created by McLean Parents and Students)  http://dontturnitin.com

7. Anderson, Nate.  “High Schoolers Turn In Plagiarism Screeners for Copyright Infringement.”  30 March 2007.  Ars Technica.  http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070330-high-schoolers-turn-in-plagiarism-screeners-for-copyright…

8. CCCC-IP Caucus Recommendations Regarding Academic Integrity and the Use of Plagiarism Detection Services.  /ccccip.org/aggregator

9. Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices. http://wpacouncil.org/book/export/html/9

10. Glod, Maria.  “McLean Students Sue Anti-Cheating Service.”  29 March 2007. Washington Post.com.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/28/AR2007032802038

11. Howard, Rebecca Moore.  Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators.  Volume 2 in the series Perspectives on Writing: Theory, Research, Practice. Connecticut:  Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1999.  130-131.

12. Judge Hilton’s Order and Memorandum Opinion in which he grants summary judgment for iParadigms, LLC. 11 March 2008.  http://www.iparadigms.com/iParadigms_03-11-08_Opinion.pdf

Additional References

Anderson, Nate.  “Are Teachers and Computers Responsible for Plagiarism?”  20 October 2006.  Ars Technica.  http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061020-8041.html?rel

Carvin, Andy.  “The Politics of Plagiarism Detection Services.”  Learning Now.  PBS Teachers.  22 September 2006.   http://www.pbs.org/teachers/learning.now/2006/09/the_ethics_of_plagiarism_detec.html

“High School Students Take on Turnitin.”  The Wired Campus.  From The Chronicle of Higher Education.  30 March 2007.  http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/1968/high-school-students-take-on-turnitin
 
Mallon, Thomas.  Stolen Words: The Classic Book on Plagiarism.  New York: Harcourt, 2001.

Posner, Richard.  The Little Book of Plagiarism.  New York: Pantheon Books, 2007.

“Students File Lawsuit Against Turnitin.com”  Legal Clips.  The National School Boards Association.  May 2007.  http://www.nsba.org/site/doc_cosa.asp?TRACKID=&VID=50&CID=491&DID=40968

“Taking a Hard Line on Turnitin”  The Wired Campus.  From The Chronicle of Higher Education.  22 September 2006.  http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/1588/taking-a-hard-line-on-turnitin

Turnitin Legal Document.  July 2002.  (Turnitin commissioned an opinion from the law firm of Foley & Lardner for Turnitin.com to answer legal questions about the service).  Need website!!

United States District Court Eastern District of Virginia (Alexandria Division) Complaint for Copyright Infringement. (The McLean Lawsuit filed 19 March 2007).  http://www.essayfraud.org/AV_et_al_Versus_iParadigms_LLC_Complaint.pdf