[LINK] Education ICT Clouds

[Alex (Maxious) Sadleir]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 3:59 PM, Roger Clarke <Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au> wrote:
> At 4:37 +0000 22/3/11, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
> Unis prepare for next Cloud wave
> http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/379960/unis_prepare_next_cloud_wave
> ...
>>Following a wave of migration to Cloud-based email systems for students
>>and staff, Australian universities are preparing for the next migration
>>trend, outsourcing instances of the popular Blackboard student resources
>>portal to the vendorís own servers.
>
> Do the providers of cloud services to universities gain access to the
> data in the documents, and to the messages that flow to and from
> staff-members and students?

Something that annoyed me greatly was/is the use of turnitin.com, an
anti-plagiarism and electronic assessment submission online service.
As they advertise right on their front page, they have quite literally
pirated (to use the copyright lobby term) "135+ million archived
student papers". That is papers which are submitted using the service
to be checked for plagiarism are archived to provide to other users
for their plagiarism check:
http://turnitin.com/static/products/content.php

This wasn't made clear to me when submitting assignments
electronically via email or an LMS because the terms (or even the fact
that the service is being used) isn't made available unless you are
using it to submit directly. Some students saw this as copyright
infringement but were unsuccessful in their lawsuit in the US:
http://turnitin.com/static/pdf/us_Legal_Document.pdf
I would disagree; taking someone's intellectual output and then
providing it as a paid service without royalties to the original
author seems unethical.