Students Lose, Fair Use Wins in Suit Targeting Anti-Plagiarism Tool

The Wired Campus published an article discussing the defeat students have recently "uffered another defeat in their legal fight against the company that runs a plagiarism-detection tool popular among professors."

This topic is one that is troublesome to me because I am not sure exactly where I stand on the issue. A federal appeals court ruled that the service did not violate the copyright of students even though it stores digital copies of their essays. The important question for me is who actually owns a paper when it is passed in. In High School I would assume you retain ownership because you are legally bound to attend school and hence ownership of your work should remain in your hand. At college I believe the line is a bit finer. University's Student Code of Conduct do not clearly spell out who has the legal copyright for the work. Is there some sort of mutual use doctrine because you are passing it as as paper for a grade?

The courts are claiming that the company is protected under the fair use doctrine; however, to me it seems like they are stretching that policy to it's limits. This company is profiting off providing a service feeding off of students. It can be compared to Google making money off Google Books (writer's works), but the difference is that Google gives authors the right to opt-out.

Just because the court sees that this new use is of "substantial public benefit" does not necessarily make it right. If that was the case should we provide some sort of "fair use" for trademarks that are of substantial public benefit, such as medicines? Granted, these two are completely different topics; nevertheless, it seems the government is looking at it from the side of "we should be aiding universities and schools finding students cheat" rather than what is truly right or wrong given the fundamentals of our country.

I plan to stay as an observer on this case but would love to see some sort of resolutions between the service and the students whose papers are on the site.