A website designed to pinpoint plagiarism is in the midst of a legal battle after high school students filed a lawsuit last week alleging the company violated privacy laws by storing their work in its database without their permission.
Four high school students from Arizona and Virginia — who are unnamed in the suit because they are minors — filed a complaint in the Eastern District of Virginia Court against TurnItIn.com, a website high school teachers and college professors often use to check students’ papers for plagiarism by cross-referencing them with the site’s stored material.
The students claim the website violated their privacy rights by profiting off of their unpublished manuscripts without their consent. TurnItIn operates on a subscription basis, and it offers students’ work to be cross-referenced by the website’s clients upon request.
“A big, wealthy corporation is ripping off high school students, and I don’t like it,” said attorney Robert Vanderhye, who is representing the students for free.
According to the official complaint, the plaintiffs are accusing iParadigms, the website’s parent company, of having known “for several years that the archiving of student-authored unpublished manuscripts without the permission of the students is inappropriate.”
The complaint accuses iParadigms of violating federal privacy laws by retaining the manuscripts with students’ personal information and sending them to any of the company’s clients without students’ permission. Students can specifically request the website does not retain its work after it clears the plagiarism test, but the complaint alleges these requests have been ignored.
“If you read [iParadigm’s] own attorney’s opinion on its website, it says that the most legally sensitive aspect of this system is [the archiving],” Vanderhye said. “Those are code words for saying, ‘You’ve really got a problem here.'”
According to the complaint, Vanderhye said he wrote a letter Nov. 15 on behalf of the Virginian students demanding that iParadigms stop archiving the work of students who object, but he said the letter was never sufficiently addressed by iParadigms CEO John Barrie.
Barrie defended his company in an email to The Daily Free Press and predicted dire consequences should the complaint gain traction.
“If TurnItIn is hurt by the Virginia lawsuit, then it would be like declaring a national holiday for cheaters, and it would be tantamount to telling the majority of honest students that they are on their own,” he said in the email.
Barrie said his company serves more than 7,000 institutions in more than 90 countries, 95 percent of which renew their subscriptions without complaint.
“I think that the statistics speak for themselves,” he said. “TurnItIn has become a very valuable and indispensable part of how education works for millions of people.”
Vanderhye said, however, statistics of users’ satisfaction are irrelevant because a lawsuit to challenge the website would normally cost “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Boston University maintains a subscription to the California-based company, said writing fellow Darcie Hutchinson.
Hutchinson, who said she has never found any instances of plagiarized material in her classes as an instructor, said she has never used the service and uses a search engine to see if students have committed plagiarism.
“I’m all in favor of anybody or any organization that tries to identify plagiarists,” BU English professor Leslie Epstein said in an email. “It is a crime in an academic setting, and all of us should do what we can to stop it.”