What is Turnitin or turn it in?

Turnitin.com operates a for profit website purportedly dedicated to the prevention of plagiarism. Yet, the facts that submission to tunitin is arbitrarily applied by professors and that turnitin is potentially appropriating students’ intellectual property makes the endeavor seem nearly as suspect as the cheating they claim to be trying to stem. Basically, turnitin allows professors to turn your paper in to the company and have it cross-checked against thousands of other term papers that have already been submitted by other professors. In the end, when you do the math, the company receives big money from institutions of higher education to catch college students who try to “cheat”.
While this may seem to be a noble idea in principle, it is entirely another matter as it is being applied now. They basically sell universities and high schools the ability to turn in the papers submitted by their students to turnitin. They offer many purchasing options; one option allows a university to give access to all its professors to the anti-plagiarism software abilities, while a second offers the ability to purchase a multiple campus option presumably so an entire state university system of schools for example could make a purchase. There is also the one-time option that allows one professor to submit up to 150 papers from his students. Finally they offer a “department license” that allows the use of turnitin by “one academic unit” within a school. Hmm, that sounds a lot like someone whose job it is to sit there at your own school and enter your papers into turnitin’s system.
The main problem with all this is that turnitin does not have any true legal claim nor rights in the intellectual property of college students. When a college kid submits his or her paper for academic credit to a university they do not issue a blanket release of their rights in the document. So, how do they do this? They simply do it. In 2003 alone they took in over $10,000,000 checking for plagiarism. Who knew trying to catch kids cheating was so profitable? Estimates now surpass the $50,000,000 mark in total. Yet, turnitin is essentially profiting through the storage and compilation of many unwilling students’ term papers without paying a penny in royalties to the students whose work the company depends upon. Sounds a little like cheating doesn't it?