by:
  Michael Donnelly,
  Rebecca Ingalls,
  Tracy Ann Morse,
  Joanna Castner, and
  Anne Meade
  Stockdell-Giesler

  The Concept of Intellectual Property

Beyond the loss of learning involved with this use of technology, there are issues of legality that collide with issues of pedagogy and (pre)judgment of our students. As one who has used Turnitin.com a handful of times for the first time last semester, I can attest to the confusion that decision has brought me. When I do suspect that pieces of a student's text may have been intentionally or unintentionally copied (without citation) from elsewhere, Google is not always a catch-all, and Turnitin.com has been able to trace lifted chunks of text back to their sketchy sources. Nevertheless, the living spirits of my graduate school's institutional review board have haunted me, and I cannot help but to wonder what kind of Intellectual Property Rights infringement or acts of privacy invasion I have committed.

Of course, I'm not the only one to question the legality issues of such software usage; many concerned teacher-scholars in recent years (e.g., Carbone, 2001; Foster, 2002; Howard, 2001; Masur, 2001) have discussed the complexities of Intellectual Property as it relates to plagiarism-detection software. These concerns are further complicated when we take into consideration how we who use such software may be judging and then taking students to a kind of secret court without their permission.

Though I did tell students from the beginning of the semester that the school subscribes to and uses Turnitin.com, I think this hardly counts as acquiring their permission to upload their writing to its database. Further, the power dynamic itself involved in that first day of class, when a teacher attempts to put down the proverbial foot and establish rules and expectations, doesn't exactly open its doors to students' questions about the protection of their Intellectual Property. In addition, many students don't even understand fully the concept of Intellectual Property, let alone realize that such protection exists.

In one rare case, the issue has seen some international coverage, thanks to McGill University student Jesse Rosenfeld, who - after refusing to upload his essays to Turnitin.com and whose teacher subsequently failed him on those essays - appealed to the school's senate committee and won (Grinburg, 2004). But such cases are few and far between, which further calls into question students' lack of knowledge about their rights, our preconceived notions of them as guilty from the get-go and the secrecy of institutions' and teachers' policing of their work.

• Introduction: A Writing Program Director's Dilemma
• Flying, Finally
• The Role of the WPA
• The Problems with PDS
• May the Conversation Continue...
• Dissimulation in the Writing Classroom
• The Devaluing of Growth?
• A Lack of Ethics
• An Ethos of Academic Integrity
• Students Consenting to Turnitin.com: What Are We Asking When We Ask Them to Sign Away Their Work?
• The Concept of Intellectual Property
• Roots of Consent
• Why "Consent" May Not Be Sufficient
• Turnitin.com: A Teaching Tool
• Responsibility for Writing
• A Focus on Revision
• Turnitin: Oversimplified Answer to a Complex Problem
• Skill and Creativity
• Self-Fulfilling Prophesies
• A Stimulus to Creativity
• Engagement and Success
• Conclusion
• References
• print version