A little more consistency on DRM and Turnitin
This morning two of my trains of thought just collided.
Part of the problem with DRM is that it doesn’t allow for any uses but preconceived ones. If I were to try to make a tool that given a small video clip would suggest where it came from, I wouldn’t be able to do that. Further, I shouldn’t need to compensate the rights owners as this doesn’t make a copy of their work, only generates signatures.
Compare that to my stance on Turnitin.com.
There’s lots of problems with Turnitin. I didn’t expect that anyone would be scouring my content to check my essays against later. For another thing, it upsets me that the company can make money off my back and I can’t say no or see a cent from it.
I can’t reconcile these two standards. I’m going to grudgingly accept Turnitin’s existence and cut DRM proponents a little bit of slack from now on.
4 Comments to “A little more consistency on DRM and Turnitin”
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mmm very interesting. I’d never considered that.
One way around your situation, I suppose, would be to accept that people are going to be making money off you whatever you do (at least until you get Mann-style vision that will obliterate any advertisement you come in contact with), and instead complain that there is a high risk of abuse in such an opaque system… Then you might even be able to merge the two arguments :)
The collision is pretty much right in the backyard of fair use (or fair dealing). What we’re looking at is whether or not certain uses are fair or not and you’re entering into very gray territory that causes a lot of similar collisions.
The problem is that we, as users, do not know what uses are fair or not until a court rules on it and such rulings are scarce at the moment.
Your thought trains do indeed collide, but it’s going to take years to figure out where the collision happened and what the casualties were.
@David, that’s a good point. It’s hard to keep a black box system fair, and I worry about their archival.
@Jonathan, another problem is see is that these court rulings rarely lead to hard and fast rules for fair use/dealing. We’re not going to see a Betamax-level case for plagiarism.
My biggest problem with turnitin is that it stifles contributions from students to Wikipedia and the like. I edit articles I’ve got an interested in, and that means when writing papers for school it’s just more prudent to avoid these topics.
@Lance: Ah, contributions to Wikipedia… I hadn’t even considered that.