Cybernet News have picked on an interesting story about anti-plagiarism site Turnitin being sued by students for copyright violation. The students sneakily applied for copyrights on some of their papers, and then submitted them to Turnitin. Because Turnitin has an automated essay submission service designed to be used by teachers, the papers were accepted. Now those same students are suing Turnitin for $900,000.
Although this seems like a clear case of entrapment and I’m sure Turnitin will win the court case, it does highlight the problems with online copyright laws. For instance many bloggers frequently copy details from other sites and news sites. I do this myself, and to be honest I’m never quite sure when or if I’m breaking copyright law. The same goes with the use of images in posts.
I also wonder how copyright law applies to sites like Techmeme. I think submission sites like Digg, Yahoo and Del.icio.us are protected by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) and safe harbor i.e. if copyrighted material is added then it is the submitter who is breaking the law, and all the site in question has to do to stay within the law is remove any illegal content it is made aware of in a timely manner (a similar approach should be taken for libelous content).
But, content that is added to Techmeme is chosen directly by Techmeme, so surely Techmeme isn’t protected? Any legal experts out there?
