TurnItIn Owes Me Money
Dec 11th, 2005 by Alex
TurnItIn is a bitch of a company. Until they pay me licensing fees for my intellectual property, I refuse to sit back and be robbed.
TurnItIn is a company that allows a teacher or professor to scan a student’s submitted work for comparison against a database of known works. The goal is to prevent plagiarism. It’s a service that educational facilities pay for. The service collects student-submitted works and stores them. The service also parses web sites for content and stores that as well.
While I agree that people should write their own work, I take issue with the harvesting of online works. My writing — though published online — is still my intellectual property. I certainly don’t grant a corporate entity the right to profit from my works without my permission. I own the rights to my works, even if they are just dinky little blog entries. If they’re going to profit, I’d want to see some licensing fees paid.
The good news is that TurnitinBot — their site’s spider/bot — appears to follow robots.txt standard. I place the follow text in my robots.txt file:
User-agent: TurnitinBot Disallow: /
Assuming that their bot continues to observe the standard, they won’t have access to anything on my site. That is, until I see some money out of them. I’m not holding my breath.
![[del.icio.us]](http://www.moundalexis.com/images/delicious.png){kind=small}