A group of us were just lambasting “plagiarism software” the other day:

“We do not protect scholarly work by creating a culture of suspicion about student writing. We do not protect scholarly work by turning originality into an algorithm. And we do not protect scholarly work by requiring students to upload and thus license their intellectual property to a corporation that profits off the database it builds from that work. That is Turnitin’s business model.”

Source: Who Controls Your Dissertation?

“I am no particular fan of genealogy. But it certainly produces more substantial knowledge than ranking academics and universities and persecuting students who are held to a standard of originality by which their professors manifestly do not abide.”

Peter Stallybrass, “Against Thinking.” PMLA 122(5), p. 1585.