Students Sue for Homework

Four teenage students are suing an antiplagiarism website for the rights to their schoolwork, arguing that they were forced to turn over original work without compensation, the Christian Science Monitor reports. When their school adopted an antiplagiarism service called Turnitin, students were required to submit essays to be stored and compared against millions of others in a database.

Students say the service violates their intellectual property rights. Experts say expect to see a lot more cases involving indexing copy. "There are a lot of businesses that depend on making copies in order to index, or make things searchable, or create filters. All of these kinds of things today are valuable," says Fred von Lohmann, a San Francisco property rights attorney.  (More plagiarism stories.)