Updated March 2007

We keep "an eye" on our web traffic - watching for broken links, unusual patterns of access, heavy traffic in particular areas, etc. Yesterday, I came across a crawler known as the TurnitinBot with sufficient accesses to our site to put it high up the list of browsers. A new one on me; visited their web site and learnt " This robot collects content from the Internet for the sole purpose of helping educational institutions prevent plagiarism."

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

My first reaction was to say "Of all the damned cheek" .... like many sites, we generally welcome robots because they provide a service for both our potential users and also for ourselves, by telling people about our web site / helping with our marketing. But here is this new crawler using considerable bandwidth and saying "We're not here to help YOU - we're here ONLY to help educational institutions .....".

But then, I guess I'm in favour of students handing in their own work rather than someone else's - both in order for it to be a "level playing field" and in the longer term so that people we might look to employ are thinkers rather than duplicators. And I guess I have a slight feeling that I'm delighted that this robot feels that our content is actually worth indexing in the fight against copyright theft.

What irks me slightly is that the robot is being used for an out-of-the-normal purpose, and it's a purpose that provides us with much obvious (and perhaps lesser) benefit, an the operators just helped themselves to our bandwidth without so much as an introductory email. To be fair, they did check (and are re-checking every 12 hours) our robot exclusion settings through which I could ask them to cease indexing us.

In the light of day, I'll probably let the robot index our pages. It's been going through our Open Talk Forum with great vigour, which means that it's protecting not only the content that we at Well House Consultants have written, but also the content of our contributors.

Addition - March 2007. I note that my concerns are NOT alone about this company - the Washington Post reports: "Two McLean High School students have launched a court challenge against a California company hired by their school to catch cheaters, claiming the anti-plagiarism service violates copyright laws. The lawsuit, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, seeks $900,000 in damages from the for-profit service known as Turnitin..

Full Article

I have to admit that I'm in support of this Student's case - I feel the company acts arrogantly in the field of breaking individual's copyright and imposing traffic loads, etc while at the very same time claiming to be providing a service to prevent such copyright breaches. A case of the pot calling the kettle black.
(written 2004-11-24 06:49:48)

 G502 - Well House Consultants - Business Practice

Back to Technical Weekend / Geekmas

Previous and next or Horse's mouth home

Forward to Spelling and grammar

Tcl embeds
Portrait of the author
Thanksgiving dinner
Spelling and grammar
Trawling our site to prevent student copying
Technical Weekend / Geekmas
Conversion and coercion in Java
Feedback shows the tip of an iceberg
Staff theft
PHP v Java