Two McLean High School students have launched a court challenge against a California company hired by their school to catch cheaters, claiming the anti-plagiarism service violates copyright laws.

The lawsuit, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, seeks $900,000 in damages from the for-profit service known as Turnitin. The service seeks to root out cheaters by comparing student term papers and essays against a database of more than 22 million student papers as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals. In the process, the student papers are added to the database.

“All of these kids are essentially straight-A students, and they have no interest in plagiarizing,” said Robert A. Vanderhye, a McLean attorney representing the students pro bono. “The problem with [Turnitin] is the archiving of the documents. They are violating a right these students have to be in control of their own property.”

Washington Post

Interesting. I’d like to see how the judge rules on this. The students own the work, yet someone else is taking it and making a profit out of it without permission. I hope the school doesn’t side with the company providing this service. I believe in copyright, but I think it needs to be reformed to protect the creators more and the consumers, when applicable. Right now copyright is written for publishing and record companies, which is why I wouldn’t be completely surprised if these students lose.

Thanks to Blast Furnace Canada for bringing this story to my attention.

I’m sharing a site I started 2 weeks ago. The goal of this site is to provide a resource for individuals that want to change their negative impact on the environment to a positive one. Right now the site is on a slow server, so at certain times of the day you may notice it lagging. In a few months, when I have more resources, I hope to place the site on a faster server. But right now I am looking writers to contribute to the site. If you think you have something to contribute, email me at tyler@tylerkinch.com and we can discuss.

Click on the logo to visit the site:

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

Washington Post

Interesting. I know that even real “street musicians” that are great at their art, have trouble gathering crowds. I think that busking is an art of it’s own though, it’s much different than being on a traditional stage.

Thanks to Buckdog for the following:

Air Canada rejects Liberals’ request for plane

Liberal organizers are scrambling to find suitable air transport for their leader’s tour in the next federal election after Air Canada told them it has no plane available.
While the Conservatives and NDP have secured arrangements with Canada’s largest airline in past elections, the Liberals have flown with other airlines.

CTV News