Who will be turning YOUR ideas into money?

After reading Rebecca Moore Howard’s “Understanding Internet Plagiarism” I found myself thinking about the website www.turnitin.com.  For those who are not familiar with the site, it is a place where a user may submit text, such as a Word document, and Turnitin compares the user’s text to a vast database of text.  The site then discerns whether the text in whole or in parts was plagiarized and displays a report.

It is generally understood that by submitting your text it becomes part of the massive database.  This growing database is necessary to filter out plagiarism.  I wondered what other possible uses the company might have for this ever-expanding collection of user-submitted original work, so I checked out the site’s http://www.turnitin.com/static/usage.html.  I saw this:

Your License to Us: Unless otherwise indicated in this Site, including our Privacy Policy or in connection with one of our services, any communications or material of any kind that you e-mail, post, or transmit through the Site (excluding personally identifiable information of students and any papers submitted to the Site), including, questions, comments, suggestions, and other data and information (your “Communications”) will be treated as non-confidential and non-proprietary. You grant iParadigms a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, irrevocable license to reproduce, transmit, display, disclose, and otherwise use your Communications on the Site or elsewhere for our business purposes. We are free to use any ideas, concepts, techniques, know-how in your Communications for any purpose, including, but not limited to, the development and use of products and services based on the Communications.

I underlined “excluding personally identifiable information of students and any papers submitted to the Site” because it was the sentence that stood out to me. 

For now, Turnitin’s policy is to not use submitted works in the database as a means for profit  — but how long will this policy be standard with databases such as these?  What would it take for a hacker to access this database of ideas and thoughts?  What will be the limit on the price for a third party to purchase such a varied, digital think-tank?  While Turnitin follows this policy above, what about other sites that will be forced to develop in the face of growing plagiarism and piracy in the online world?

Personal information is bought and sold around the globe in the millions.  What happens when original thoughts and ideas of a person become a resource?  A person’s genes can be patented by corporations and used for profit, what will it mean when your words can be as well?  Who will be profiting from your next big idea?