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SafeAssign: Intellectual Property Rights

 

Issue: Students who turn in papers through SafeAssign are automatically participating in an “institutional database” that collects and stores these papers and checks future papers against them.

 

Potential Benefits: The institutional database is intended to prevent students from recycling or duplicating papers. For example, if a student writes a paper for a class, this prevents his roommate from using that paper as his own work the following semester.

 

Potential Problem: Students are unable to opt out of having their work stored in the institutional database. Also, students may legitimately return at some later point to previous work, further developing their ideas and building upon that writing. This legitimate re-working would likely be identified as plagiarism in a SafeAssign originality report.

 

Discussion
Whether one chooses to submit papers on a case-by-case basis or require students to submit their own work, faculty should clarify their intentions with their students and explain the process by which students submit and offer their work for use in the SafeAssign system.

 

There are two distinct databases associated with SafeAssign that have the ability to collect and use student work: the institutional database and the global database. The institutional database collects only VCU student work, whereas the global database collects papers submitted by all SafeAssign users. Students who are required to submit their papers to SafeAssign through Blackboard have their papers automatically integrated into the institutional database. The global database, however, is an “opt-in” feature. Students have the choice whether or not to add their papers to the global database system.

 

While the majority of students will undoubtedly go along with the SafeAssign submission process without question, students who do question the ethics of the system raise interesting concerns. Why, for example, should a student provide his or her work to the SafeAssign system without any benefit? Such a system subverts students’ right to own and secure their work for the profit of an outside company. Though the SafeAssign system improves its comprehensiveness as students submit more and more papers to the system, the students themselves are not compensated for their contributions. Further, students may not care to have their work perpetually available in electronic form.

 

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Also in this section:

• The View From the Writing Center
• General Guidelines for Using SafeAssign
• Issues Associated with SafeAssign
  • Intellectual Property Rights
  • Comprehensiveness
  • Intellectual Property V Common Phrases