Blayne Sucks

There’s an interesting legal case involving some students and an anti-cheating service that was reported by the Washington Post. Basically these students wrote some papers, sent them to an anti-cheating service online, asked the service not to include the papers in their database, and found the papers included anyhow. They are suing from the standpoint that the anti-cheating service has violated their copyrights.

There are two opposing issues. First, students should have rights to the things they create as a part of the learning process. Second, schools should have a right to check that a student’s work is original. Decades ago, this was pretty straightforward since students could really only cheat locally. However, with the advent of the computer age, students can now copy virtually anything from anywhere. That’s why anti-cheating services exist.

So here’s the thing that worries me about this: What happens if these students win? Schools are still going to want to be able to check for cheaters. It is in the best interest of the school to not graduate people who didn’t actually learn what they were supposed to learn. In order to check for cheaters, these schools are going to have to use services like this online anti-cheating. If students own the copyright to their work, then schools will have to require that students assign their rights to the school to have the freedom to submit them to anti-cheating services.

This happens in business all the time. Authors are hired to write specific books. Engineers are hired to solve specific problems. These works are owned by the company they work for and not the author or inventor because of their employment agreements. It also has been happening at the University level for a while. (e.g. North Carolina State University)

It feels like a pretty slippery slope to me. What happens when the next Stephen King finds that his alma mater is suing him for copyright violation on a story that evolved from a short story he wrote back when he was a student in a creative writing class? I would think that at the public school level students should not have to sign away their rights to the things they create. Things change a bit at the University level because you are not required by the government to get a University degree and there are many, many successful people who never attended college.

Anyhow, I know I’m not a lawyer, but this sort of problem is worth keeping an eye on.