ethics - Potential issues with uploading copyrighted material to TurnItIn?

My university uses TurnItIn to check student's work for plagiarism and collusion. I think the underlying TurnItIn database includes both submitted work and material it has found by crawling the web, but not material behind pay walls. One major issue with TurnItIn, and presumably all plagiarism detection software, is that it can only compare submitted work to material which is in the database. This means that TurnItIn either misses when students copy from textbooks which are behind a pay wall or matches other sources which have plagiarised the textbook.

My department's academic misconduct committee is thinking about seeding the TurnItIn database with the textbook chapters that are most often used by the students by submitting a number of "assignments" that are copies of the textbook chapters. This would require an individual member(s) of staff to submit assignments that contained copied copyright material. Is it possible that this could get the staff member in trouble in the future? We were thinking about adding something like:

The following submission is intended to seed the TurnItIn database and is an exact copy of FULL REFERENCE.

Would this work, or would TurnItIn realize that it is being given copyrighted material and purge it from its database?

Answer

This is a bit long for a comment, but I also acknowledge that only someone from TurnItIn could categorically answer this.

Since TurnItIn does not provide access to source material (other than small sections which actually match the submitted paper), I do not see how it could be a copyright issue. I get matches all the time from papers submitted to other schools, yet, TurnItIn does not allow me to see that paper.

Additionally, much of the content within TurnItIn is under copyright (blogs and others) and they do not purge it, further implying that they would not have a problem with your plan.

All that said, unless the content is quite new, or changed regularly, as soon as one student includes content, any other student including that same content will trigger a flag for you.

So, I do not believe your plan will have any problem but I am also not sure you need to worry about it unless you have a special set of texts you believe other students around the world will not have access to.