@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.

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.

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 :)