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IP blues...
Mar. 29th, 2007 09:22 pmA story in yesterday's online WaPo tells of two McLean high school students that went to the trouble of formally filing a copyright on papers they wrote for school, which were subsequently processed by a company called Turnitin, which compared the papers against 22 million other papers in their database to determine whether they had been plaigarized, and then added the papers to the database, despite instructions from the copyright holders that the papers not be added.
It's an interesting situation, made more interesting by the fact that a $900,000 suit has been filed against Turnitin in the matter. And keep in mind that actually filing a copyright is largely immaterial in this matter, because the copyright law basically says that you own the rights to things you create (if memory serves, if you don't file, you can only stop people from infringing, but not collect damages).
The solution, of course, is clear. I suspect that once this kerfuffle has settled down, Turnitin will tweak their contracts and end up with the rights to add papers without any worries, and the most likely solution will be for schools to have students assign all rights associated with class-related papers to the school. (Indeed, some ambitous schools might even try to apply such assignment of rights to anything students create, in class or out, along the lines of various employment agreements I've seen over the years, in which the company one works for lays claim to not only all innovations you might come up with on the job, but also those you come up with in your off hours, even if they have nothing to do with work. But I digress...)
Galina told me this morning that she had accomplished pretty much everything she could in Pagosa, and that she was planning to start for Texas today. That would put her back here tomorrow night. Hooray!
I started the day by carefully going though my jobs for the past couple of weeks and trying to match them to invoices and to the fact that said invoices had been sent. I was saddened to note that one invoice - a small one, but still - which should have gone out two weeks ago never made it out the wire, until today. I still have some invoices left to take care of, as well as some end-of-month stuff for clients who insist on that kind of an arrangement.
Heck, hiring a full-time bookkeeper will be about as beneficial as hiring a second translator, methinks.
Cheers...
It's an interesting situation, made more interesting by the fact that a $900,000 suit has been filed against Turnitin in the matter. And keep in mind that actually filing a copyright is largely immaterial in this matter, because the copyright law basically says that you own the rights to things you create (if memory serves, if you don't file, you can only stop people from infringing, but not collect damages).
The solution, of course, is clear. I suspect that once this kerfuffle has settled down, Turnitin will tweak their contracts and end up with the rights to add papers without any worries, and the most likely solution will be for schools to have students assign all rights associated with class-related papers to the school. (Indeed, some ambitous schools might even try to apply such assignment of rights to anything students create, in class or out, along the lines of various employment agreements I've seen over the years, in which the company one works for lays claim to not only all innovations you might come up with on the job, but also those you come up with in your off hours, even if they have nothing to do with work. But I digress...)
Galina told me this morning that she had accomplished pretty much everything she could in Pagosa, and that she was planning to start for Texas today. That would put her back here tomorrow night. Hooray!
I started the day by carefully going though my jobs for the past couple of weeks and trying to match them to invoices and to the fact that said invoices had been sent. I was saddened to note that one invoice - a small one, but still - which should have gone out two weeks ago never made it out the wire, until today. I still have some invoices left to take care of, as well as some end-of-month stuff for clients who insist on that kind of an arrangement.
Heck, hiring a full-time bookkeeper will be about as beneficial as hiring a second translator, methinks.
Cheers...
