Copyright, Commerce and Culture would be the twenty-fourth class I have been enrolled in throughout my college career. That means that I have sat through twenty-four professors lecture my peers and me about the importance of respect and severity of breaking plagiarism rules. To quote from our course syllabus, plagiarism is “a serious offense under regulations of this University.” Apparently, NYU is not the only establishment to strongly enforce these rules. A district court judge ruled this week that Rusty Carroll, the owner of multiple term paper-selling websites, shut them down to finally put an end to the selling of authors’ creative works without their consent. As far as I know, these types of websites include scholarly articles, which are likely copyrighted, as well as peer-written articles, which are most likely not copyrighted. This clearly displays two types of issues, however, this ruling is in reaction to a class-action lawsuit against the company; meaning multiple people are pissed off.

I find it funny that this ruling is the first of its kind since, as the article states, the act of selling term papers is an age old practice that originated long before the Internet. In fact, I vividly remember my own excitement while researching for a final paper for Social Foundations, and finding a history paper that my friend wrote while in High School (being respectful of the rules of plagiarism, I obviously avoided copying him!) The thing is, he sold his paper to this website, and he’s not the only one. I know plenty of other people who have sold their class notes and term papers to websites like GradeGuru, which is actually owned by McGraw Hill. By selling their notes and papers, these people are essentially giving away the rights of their creative works to anyone who seeks it using a simple Google search.

But this doesn’t change the fact that once that material is used without citation, it becomes plagiarism. Is one supposed to cite any Jane or John Doe in their research papers just because the information was legally obtained? Would a professor possibly consider this a valid resource of information? Most likely, the answer is no. In this recent ruling, the district court ordered the company to shut down, unless they could prove that all those papers used by Internet users across the globe were posted with the consent of the authors. I highly doubt Mr. Carroll will be able to get himself out of this mess…

A link to the article featured in USA Today:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-02-01-term-papers_N.htm