Fair Use and the Courts

This is an interesting article from Ars Technica addressing plagiarism, copyright, and fair use. It reports on the results of a court case in which students sued TurnItIn on the grounds that it violated the students' copyright by storing their papers online. The students lost because according to a federal court decision:

TurnItIn's use was "fair" according to the four factors found in US copyright law, with most weight being given to the "transformative" nature of what TurnItIn was doing with the papers.

Plaintiffs argued that [TurnItIn parent company] iParadigms’ use of their works cannot be transformative because the archiving process does not add anything to the work. TurnItIn merely stores the work unaltered and in its entirety. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals felt that argument "was misguided." Their conclusion:

The use of a copyrighted work need not alter or augment the work to be transformative in nature... iParadigms' use of plaintiffs’ works had an entirely different function and purpose than the original works; the fact that there was no substantive alteration to the works does not preclude the use from being transformative in nature.

So, an interesting interpretation of fair use. The article describes the court decision as a "primer on fair use," providing another copyright resource.