Washington Post: McLean Students Sue Anti-Cheating Service.
The lawsuit, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, seeks $900,000 in damages from the for-profit service known as Turnitin. The service seeks to root out cheaters by comparing student term papers and essays against a database of more than 22 million student papers as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals. In the process, the student papers are added to the database.
Turnitin.com provides a service, but its archiving — copying and reusing — the copyrighted work of others in this way is at best problematic.