Legal issues and Turnitin

Some questions have been raised about the legal implications of submitting a student's work to Turnitin, in relation to copyright, privacy and intellectual property.  We are members of the Caval Plagiarism Detection Consortium and, on behalf of the Consortium, Caval has obtained legal advice on these matters from copyright lawyers Blake Waldron Dawson. The advice is that the only significant area of concern is that of copyright, and here the likelihood of a successful action is considered "remote", especially if the student signs an assignment cover sheet that includes the following statement (for example):

I declare that this assignment is original and has not been submitted for assessment elsewhere, and acknowledge that the assessor of this assignment may, for the purpose of assessing this assignment:

·         reproduce this assignment and provide a copy to another member of faculty; and/or

·         communicate a copy of this assignment to a plagiarism checking service (which may then retain a copy of this assignment on its database for the purpose of future plagiarism checking.)

When an assignment is submitted electronically, the student should add these words before submitting it.