Modern English?

I was recently informed by a government high school english teacher that their students must submit all written essays through the internet these days.

Why?

Well the website they use is - TurnItIn.com - and it checks papers for plagiarism against some sort of large database.

And yet these dumb kids all know this and many STILL try to hand in unoriginal work!

How much does it cost these schools?

Well I couldn't find out. The website is deliberately silent on the matter but I'm wagering it costs a whole lot of money. The silence (or my blindness?) reminded me of the difficult time I had trying to to find out how much the BANKRUPT town of Hull, Massachusetts was spending on solar-powered trash compactors. Of course it's a rational deception on the part of any entity whose fundamental business strategy is ripping off taxpayers!

Anyways in this new Web 2.0 Information Age one has to admire the people who came up with this ingenious super-high profit business idea. I mean the site almost compels school districts - the ones with means anyway - to pay for its services. Then, over time it stores all papers that were submitted and checks new work against its own database for plagiarism.

Although there might be a problem down the road with this ironclad business plan:

Anything you write for school is automatically copyrighted; you do not need to apply for one. When you submit your work to Turnitin, Turnitin saves a copy to its database to compare against future submissions in order to stop students from plagiarizing other students’ work. Since you don’t know that Turnitin is saving a copy of your paper, and it doesn’t ask for or acquire your consent, its a potential violation of your rights.


Saving a copy of your paper is copyright infringement because Turnitin is using your paper for its own economic gain without compensating you. The copyright laws state that portions of original work may be quoted, but only if allowed by the author or for "fair use" (discussions). By making a hefty profit through subscriptions to its expensive service (which can cost thousands of dollars a year), Turnitin uses your work in a way that was not originally intended. What makes Turnitin so "effective"—the reason it is preferred over all other such sites—is that it checks students’ papers against each other. But this means that its profit is coming directly from students’ work.


Turnitin argues that its enterprise is "fair use." However, it goes no further than to say, "When students claim that Turnitin violates the law or engages in ‘commercial exploitation’ of their copyrights, that claim is simply not based on fact." This oversimplified response fails to answer the charges against it, and is probably the reason there are already multiple lawsuits filed against Turnitin.

Hah!

The DELICIOUS IRONY of the plagiarism police committing massive copyright infringement!!!

I just have to embed this classic tune in a post titled Modern English. Enjoy, reminisce:

Content Thugs

Recently, in - YouTube Overshooting - I expressed my frustration at Google/YouTube for their accelerating *copyright* enforcement.

But it's tough to really blame them given the diversified and unrelenting legal assault on them from interested lawyers and competitors. As Microsoft found out, bigness and wealth attract shakedown artists like honey does flies.

Google's won the first round of the enormous lawsuit Viacom brought against it. Viacom is suing Google for $1 billion for not having copyright lawyers inspect all the videos that get uploaded to YouTube before they're made live (they're also asking that Google eliminate private videos because these movies -- often of personal moments in YouTubers' lives -- can't be inspected by Viacom's copyright enforcers).

The lawsuit has been a circus. Filings in the case reveal that Viacom paid dozens of marketing companies to clandestinely upload its videos to YouTube (sometimes "roughing them up" to make them look like pirate-chic leaks). Viacom uploaded so much of its content to YouTube that it actually lost track of which videos were "really" pirated, and which ones it had put there, and sent legal threats to Google over videos it had placed itself.

Other filings reveal profanity-laced email exchanges between different Viacom execs debating who will get to run YouTube when Viacom destroys it with lawsuits, and execs who express their desire to sue YouTube because they can't afford to buy the company and can't replicate its success on their own.

Read the rest of it here.

Hmmmm....Sending legal threats over videos Viacom had uploaded itself?

Sounds like *entrapment* to me.

Here's hoping that Viacom's business gets decimated by the digital, internet revolution!

Slapped By YouTube, Again

A week or so ago I received a YouTube message from some guy (Tom Mabe?) nicely telling me that he had sold the rights to his *Pranks* to Sony. He advised me to take down my little clip of his - one that had amassed 225,000 hits for my account.

I didn't take it too seriously, because, well these types of notices are common.

But soon after that, I got a *copyright violation* notice from YouTube. They said it was my second one and the next would result in a cancellation of my account. Crap! (The first offense was that Jewish girl pranking her parents about her new Italian boyfriend. But that was two freakin years ago.)

Now the last thing I need is for YouTube to delete my account. I'd have to create a new identity, rename and reload at least some of the videos. So I went ahead and deleted ANY clip of mine, no matter how obscure, that could net me another potential copyright violation.

Am I pissed at this?

Yeah, a bit. But Google dragged their feet long enough on this front. I commend them for standing up to the thugs.

It seems like I'm always in trouble with the law these days, doesn't it? With my eviction situation and whatnot...

Recall YouTube also slapped me for posting objectionable content recently - my clip of drowning a rat!

BTW, to hear that hilarious Jewish/Italian prank, click here.

Try as they might, those legal thugs haven't been able to erase it from the public domain!!!

Steal And Re-Sell...

The other day, in my SideWiki post, I mentioned that some site out there has copied my *entire* blog.

Here it is.

Right now, it appears they only have my *recent entries* up - my last 20 posts or something.

But I am sure the first time I saw it every post I ever wrote was reachable by moving that button on their site. I felt completely violated!

This is how that site self-describes:

Feedmil is a real-time feed search engine featuring spam-free, topic-focused search for a variety of live streams from blogs, microblogs, podcasts, as well as public and social media. Feedmil’s goal is to help people search feeds of their current interest in the most efficient and easiest possible way through the use of innovative technologies.

Feedmil improves the entire real-time feed search process. In the search interface, feedmil allows users to specify not only the query but also the popularity range of feeds, enabling them to serendipitously discover high quality but less popular feeds located in the long tail of feeds. On the search result page, feedmil gives a unique feed search experience that also emphasizes the freshness of content beyond just topical relevance.

Did y'all catch that?

They said *spam-free*.

In other words, if I put up ads on my site (or a *tip jar*) in an effort to get compensated for my labors, my readers could choose to weed them out via their site.

Now I'm a big boy and have been fully aware, since day one, that I could never completely control my content.

But still, I can't believe Google would allow such an egregious hijacking and *de-spamming* of THEIR content. Remember, Google owns Blogger.com.

After all, as THE search engine, Google can probably put a hurting on any upstart by diverting traffic, legal challenges, etc.

At the moment, FeedMil is probably harmless. It appears to be some *VC start-up* that's, well, just hoping to turn over some new leaf, and get bought out by the likes of Yahoo, AOL, or Google!

Hard To Smother Good Humor

2.5 years ago I uploaded this absolutely hilarious clip to YouTube only to have it taken down by *lawyers* for copyright infringement. Obviously, those thugs couldn't keep it out of the public domain. Enjoy:



I wrote about that incident, my being censored, in - Copyrighted Morons.

YouTube Copyright Policing

They finally took down my hilarious clip of that Z100 phone prank. In a couple of short months it was viewed over eleven thousand times and the comment thread was pushing one hundred posts.

I couldn't really understand the legalese on that email they sent me but I think it essentially says they'll repost the clip if I provide my name and address. In other words, I need to identify myself and take responsibility for a potential lawsuit.

If I had any balls, a lot of money, or a copyright lawyer in my family I'd send my name in and mix it up.

From now on, when I post stuff I will just leave all identifiable tags and keywords out of the description. There's simply no way for the media thugs to find their copyrighted content in that multi-million clip labyrinth.

I remember when Napster tightened it up a bit. They pulled everything with "madonna" in the title. Only days later one could find the trollop's songs by searching for "medonna" or "modonna".

I am somewhat irrationally peeved that they took down my clip. But my anger pales compared to my son's - they just yanked almost all of the good Wiggles clips.