The student becomes the teacher...

It looks like we may have a couple of budding copyright attorneys.  Four high school students are suing iParadigms for copyright infringement claiming that iParadigms is stealing their papers and archiving them without consent from the authors.  IParadigms offers a product known as Turnitin to essentially catch students who plagiarize.  Schools contract with iParadigms and offer their own students’ papers for archiving.  Students are forced to sign a consent form for iParadigms to use their papers or be forced to fail the assignment. 

IParadigms is arguing that non-profit educational uses are fair, however, is the system actually being used commercially? and does it matter that the student’s papers are only used to create so called ‘digital fingerprint’ while not being displayed to the user of Turnitin in their entirety?

Theoretically, as the article states, the students never really have control over their paper even if they have filed for a copyright registration.  I wonder if iParadigms is also archiving other materials besides the students’ papers to check for plagiarism.  Turnitin claims to check all of the major newspapers and magazines for plagiarism.  Are there licensing agreements out there between iParadigm and publishers like Time or The New York Times?  Regarding novels, absent the forced consent form the students have to sign, would Dan Brown have a case if iParadigms started to archive his books?  The people over at Google seem to have a little experience in this area, maybe we should ask them…