Plagiarism Detection Software: a Godsend or Just a Plague?

Plagiarism is defined as "Using ideas, plots, text and other intellectual property developed by someone else while claiming it is your original work". Plagiarism is most often found among students, but can also be found on the internet with the wide world of blogging. To combat this growing problem, plagiarism detection software was produced. With this advancement, legal issues of intelligent property rights became a notable subject.

When a person copies passages to use in our own writings, or other works, they invade the privacy of intellectual rights of another person. There is no legal procedure giving copyrights to written works. Copyright is assumed when a product is written and produced. Therefore anytime information is copied without proper citation and reference, it is considered as done without consent.

The obvious way plagiarism is avoided is to cite the relevant passages in the text and then to attach a reference list at the bottom of the work. Students are advised and warned of plagiarism, but that has done very little in deterring the act. There is practically nothing that deters bloggers from plagiarism, as they copy their content from other sites on the web, and reword the paragraphs, believing that doing this makes the product their own.

Another dictionary term: Paraphrasing. "A restatement of a text or passage in another form or other words, often to clarify meaning." and also "Putting the ideas of another author into your own words." Without citation and reference, paraphrasing is still a form of plagiarism.

Plagiarism-detection software identifies passages of papers that are sufficiently similar to other sources that there may be an issue of whether plagiarism has occurred.[1] When plagiarism software began making it's entry into the academic world, instructors and teachers felt it was a godsend in catching cheating students. The problem began when the detection of similarity did not definitively suggest plagiarism. For example, the software lacked the ability to review properly cited references and citations.

Braumoeller and Gaines[2], Political Science professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, found that most of the papers that were flagged by the plagiarism-detection software either had appropriate citations or were, in their words, instances of ``casual plagiarism'' as opposed to ``blatant plagiarism.'' Casual plagiarism was then given the definition of being improperly cited sources.

The use of plagiarism dectection software was then discussed in conferences; rules had to be made to determine a devices fitness for use as a true detection of plagiarism. David Goodrum and Amy Lawson, of Indiana University[3] reported that it was decided the following stipulations had to apply.

To be useful, plagiarism-detection software must:

1. Compare students' papers to a broad range of sources, including, www sources, published materials, such as books, journals, magazines, newspapers, and papers submitted by other students.
2. Provide meaningful reports that identify both passages that may have been plagiarized and sources from which they may have been plagiarized, so that instructors can evaluate whether plagiarism occurred.
3. Be easy to use and fast.
4. Permit papers to be submitted by both students and instructors.
5. Operate in an environment that protects the intellectual property rights of students so that their papers may be checked without the need for their prior written consent.

Given those circumstances, it became clear that the only detection software to meet the majority of those needs was Turnitin. In fact, this software met every rule except one. Some would suggest that the missed stipulation was the most important one. That being, the last rule ensuring the protection of intellectual rights.

Turnitin.com, states that it has 400-700 colleges in the United States on its client list. A paper submitted to the service is checked against a database of manuscripts -- estimated at more than one million -- and a database of books and journals, as well as more than a billion Web sites. Phrases that seem to be unoriginal are flagged for professors to check. The process involves a color coding system where sections of the manuscript are highlighted a color according to the level of detected plagiarism. Red on one side means blatant plagiarism, while blue relates to least similar writings. [4]

So, why is this a problem? The problem lies in the marketing practices of Turnitin. Viewing their website you'll soon understand that the premise of their software is that students ARE cheating. From that premise, a manuscript is then run through the software to be checked against their database and against the word wide web.

Turnitin.com does not distinguish between cheating--intentionally cutting and pasting in elements from other electronic documents--from the inevitable mistakes in paraphrasing, summarizing, file management, note taking and so on. Cheating is wrong and should be punished. Mistakes in using and citing sources -- which can be technical, mechanical, rhetorical, and evaluative -- are in fact a necessary part of learning how to write with and from sources. To automatically and as default position equate these mistakes with fraud and cheating undermines learning. Novice writers need to be able to make and correct mistakes, in much the same way an athlete makes mistakes in practice, or in a game, and then practices some more to get it right. Turnitin.com does not convey any patience or make any distinctions in this regard. And thus it makes the challenging of addressing plagiarism harder.[5]

The second problem that Turnitin has is that when an instructor enters a students paper into the database, Turnitin copies that paper and keeps it. Only in the last year have universities began giving students fair warning that their product was being used through plagiarism detection software. This is due to a students suit against Turnitin based on intellectual rights infringement.

In January 2004, the senate committee at McGill University in Montreal sided with sophomore Jesse Rosenfeld, who argued that he should not be required to submit his essays to Turnitin.com, a Web site that verifies originality by comparing documents to thousands of others. Rosenfeld said he had "an ethical and political problem" with the university's policy of submitting student work to Turnitin.com." I was having to prove I didn't plagiarize even before my paper was looked at by my professor," Rosenfeld said.[6]

Lawyers say the problem with Turnitin.com is that student papers are copied in their entirety to the services database, which is a potential infringement of students copyrights. The copying is sometimes done without a students knowledge or consent, which is a potential invasion of their privacy.

Since 1998, Turnitin.com made more than $50,000,000 from papers stored this wa., Royalties have never been paid to any student whose intellectual property Turnitin has copied, stored, disseminated to third parties, and used to create a for-profit, derivative works-based service.[7]

Many colleges that are reported by Turnitin as being clients of their detection services no longer actually use those services due to the outcry in intellectual rights issue. On the other hand, there are many universities that still use the service and state they give written warning before hand to their students. Despite that warning, most of those universities do not give their students the right to opt out of the service.

So, it's left up to the users. The instructors and students in deciding the fate of detection software such as Turnitin. Is it copyright infringement? Does it actually detect plagiarism or does it merely find similar string words and compare them. With the lack of ability in differentiating properly cited sources, can any detection software really detect plagiarism? And finally, is it fair and legal for detection software premises to be that the student is cheating, and that their job is to catch it?