LexisNexis Copyright Protection
Just saw this press release:
LexisNexis CopyGuard
The system appears to be a plagiarism detection tool. They’re working with iParadigms, a comany which uses terms like “intellectual property theft” and seeks to “combat the piracy of intellectual property and ensure the originality of written work.” I’m a bit skeptical. Of course, originality is a criterion for copyrightable material, but ideas can’t be copyrighted, and text has to be pretty similar for copyright trouble… but I guess the accuracy of the tool depends on how well their searching and matching software works.
iParadigms also runs turnitin.com, which has some issues of it’s own involving student ownership of material, privacy and other fun subjects. This service will use “four to five years of archived Web pages from iParadigms.” I wonder about this part… where are these pages coming from? Are they coming from the Internet? If the Internet Archive is having to justify what it does in regards to copyright law, how would a commercial entity do the same?
Plagiarism Today » The Ultimate Anti-Plagiarism Database said,
August 23, 2005 @ 7:19 pm
[…] First, many wonder about the various copyright issues surrounding this tool. In an age where the non-profit Internet archive is coming under fire for storing copies of Web sites, it’s easy to see why there’s worry about a corporation doing the same thing for a product they intend to sell, especially considering that, to my knowledge, there’s no “opt out” measure available. This clearly violates fair use and could land LexisNexis in court. […]
Mr. Influence said,
August 15, 2007 @ 9:36 am
You’d be hard pressed to prevent plagarism these days with those automatic ‘article creator’ software that persuasively transforms original work into unique replicas.
People can just be so lazy!