It was only a matter of time. According to a story in the Washington Post, two McLean High School students are suing Turnitin.com for infringing their copyright. The crux of the matter seems to be that students are required to license their work to Turnitin so the service can store their work and use it in future plagiarism checks. So if we get right down to it, students are forced to use Turnitin because it’s required by their university or high school and then forfeit their rights to control their own copyright. IANAL, but that sounds like a pretty rotten deal to me. I’m rooting for the kids.

Plagiarism is a nasty problem to be sure. I dealt with it many times myself in my career as a classroom teacher. In this case it seems that educators may be leaning a bit too much on technology as a remedy when more effective collaboration between the teacher and students would be a better answer. I’m not trying to be flippant here, I just think we’ve gotten a bit lazy on this one.