Plagiarism is rampant across colleges, universities and grade schools all across the country according to Plagiarism.org, a website run by a company called iParadigms, LLC. According to the statistics reported on their website (gathered from surveys done by U.S. News and World Report), “75% of college students admitted cheating, and 90% of college students didn't believe cheaters would be caught.” It’s hard to deny these facts and scare any educational institution into a state of panic, trying to determine if their own students are among those included in the survey statistics.
The information age that we live in, currently allows students to access databases across the world that contain other’s ideas from which to possibly steal from. Why shouldn’t the educational institutions utilize the same technology to combat this unethical dilemma they are facing? For one, if the databases reference works placed by students unwittingly, and sometimes even unwillingly, aren’t the schools, universities and colleges just as amoral for using this service as the students are for choosing to plagiarize?
Interestingly enough, iParadigms, the company responsible for Plagiarism.org, also offers a for-profit product for educational institutions across the country called turnitin® that allows teachers and professors to have their students submit their assignments to crosscheck against a database built from other students assignments across the country. On the outside, this may seem like a good tool for teachers, and even students, to avoid any instances of plagiarism, including “unintended plagiarism” such as incorrect paraphrasing or referencing sources.
When students are asked to use this service, they are also asked to agree to an end user license agreement, commonly used in software programs in every industry. This type of agreement becomes a legally binding contract between the user, the student, and the company, iParadigms. In this ten page agreement and a five page privacy notice, a student is asked to agree to many terms and conditions that may not be in the best interests of the students at all. In the following section entitled, “License to Use Communications and Papers Submitted”, students must agree to the following before being allowed to submit their assignments:
“With regard to papers submitted to the Site, You hereby grant iParadigms a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, irrevocable license to reproduce, transmit, display, disclose, archive and otherwise use in connection with its Services any paper You submit to the Site whether or not originally submitted in connection with a specific class. This license shall survive the termination of the User Agreement. Any cessation of use of the Site shall not result in the termination of any license You grant herein to iParadigms.”
This little section is hard enough to swallow alone, but represents only a small fraction of what students are asked to agree to in this legally binding document that is in the best interest of iParadigms and not the student.
Essentially what this little section is saying is that by clicking on that “I Agree” button, that which in our society are trained to click and never read, you grant iParadigms the right to use your intellectual property as the source for their product. Without student’s papers, there would be no product. Even if the company terminates the student’s user agreement with them, meaning canceling their access to the site, the company will still be allowed to not only use a student’s intellectual property, they will be allowed to reproduce and transmit it to other parties without the consent of the student.
This is a scary scenario for students, knowing that they must either agree to these terms, or possibly face academic penalties from the institution in the form of diminished grades. This matter came up in a recent class at Southern New Hampshire University, where a group of students brought their concerns up to the attention of their professor. It took a rally cry of many students to have their concerns addressed properly, and an alternative service, one that does not violate student’s copyrights, was eventually offered by the administration.
Other students across the country have not been so lucky and have been forced to use this service by teachers and professors or receive a zero. With some classes, standing up for one’s beliefs can set back or even destroy one’s academic or even professional career. It can be the choice of sacrificing one’s own intellectual property knowing that plagiarism was not used to appease the concerns of the institution, or sacrificing one’s academic career to stand up for their own beliefs. When we start giving up our smaller freedoms, when do we begin to give up are larger ones? Who is really benefiting from this scenario, the student or university? Neither one; it is iParadigms that is ultimately the one profiting off of students hard work without ever having to pay them a single dime.
Whoever said there is no such thing as a free lunch, obviously has never met iParadigm’s CEO, Dr. John Barrie. His doctorate in biophysics with a concentration in neurobiology combined with research in the areas of memory and perception, make this author wonder if there really isn’t more going on here then just plagiarism detection. With iParadigms expert legal team protecting their own best interests, the company seems almost invincible to a student when stacked on top of an educational institution. This tactic, labeled by some legal analysts as undue influence under duress, seems more of a bullying tactic to make money for the company then it does to detect plagiarism. However, the company’s hands are clean, since it is the educational institutions doing the bullying.
With all of these copyright and privacy problems existing for students, iParadigms still boasts on its website that it has more than 450,000 educators using their product in millions of educational institutions. Their website also states that the company anticipates having a database consisting of over 166 million student papers next year. iParadigms is benefiting off of the hard work of students across the world, yet the amount that is given back to the students is zero. It does not seem fair to students that they are coerced into using a plagiarism service that ultimately they see no profit from.
Who is fighting for the rights of the students? Unfortunately, it does not appear that anyone is.
