• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, March 27, 2008

In a ruling that breaks new ground in copyright law, a federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by four high school students against plagiarism detection service Turnitin.

Legal experts say the ruling could give Google a boost in disputes stemming from its news aggregation site, Google News, as well as its book search program that digitizes books from the collections of public libraries.

In the Turnitin case, federal district court judge Claude Hilton in Alexandria, Va. gave the nod to a paid service that vets student papers for plagiarism by compiling a database of term papers and checking new submissions against them. More than 7,000 schools now require students to submit their papers to Turnitin, which receives upwards of 100,000 papers a day.

The students who sued said Turnitin infringed their copyright in those papers by using them in its business. They also argued that they didn't give valid consent to Turnitin because they were minors at the time, and because their schools forced them to use it.

But Hilton dismissed the students' lawsuit, ruling that Turnitin doesn't violate their copyrights to the papers because its storage and indexing of the work constitutes fair use. One reason, according to Hilton, is that Turnitin's use of the papers is transformative because the company's goals in storing them vary sharply from students' goals in writing them.

"Plaintiffs originally created and produced their works for the purpose of education and creative expression," Hilton wrote in an opinion issued earlier this month. Turnitin, by contrast, "uses the papers for an entirely different purpose, namely, to prevent plagiarism and protect the students' written works from plagiarism."

Another major factor for Hilton was that Turnitin doesn't reproduce students' papers unless its program flags a plagiarism problem. "The use of the original works is limited in purpose and scope," the judge wrote. He added that works are stored digitally and reviewed electronically for comparison purposes only. If plagiarism is detected, the company produces an "originality report" that identifies the original archived work and the school in which it was first submitted.

In that sense, some lawyers say the program appears to be similar to Google's book search, which stores books digitally but doesn't display them to users, except for brief snippets. Google's News Search also displays only brief snippets, and then users who click on the links are directed to the newspapers' sites--but Google doesn't display the articles, except for short excerpts.

"Google's argument with respect to both book search and Google News is that even though they have the full text of the service in their database, they only show limited portions of it," said Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law. "Were other courts to agree with that line of reasoning, it would reinforce what Google does with its book and news snippets."

Google currently faces copyright lawsuits by publishers and authors about the book search program. They say that scanning in library books that are under copyright violates the authors' rights. Google also has faced suits related to Google News, which lets users search articles in newspapers and returns snippets of the article in its results page. Last year, Google settled a lawsuit by Agence France Presse and also recently struck a licensing agreement with The Associated Press.

Google senior copyright counsel William Patry approved of the copyright portion of the Turnitin ruling on his personal blog, The Patry Copyright Blog. "The purpose for the use was solely to check for plagiarism (however defined), and could not conceivably interfere with any market for plaintiffs' work," he wrote. "There was a comparison of the works, and in some cases archiving of them for future comparisons, but this was all done as a part of the plagiarism checking."