Cengage Advantage Books: Foundations of the Legal Environment of Business 3rd Edition by Marianne Jennings

Exercise 20

Several students from a high school in Fairfax County, Virginia, and another in Tucson, Arizona, filed suit against iParadigms for copyright infringement. iParadigms is the company that owns and operates Turnitin, a software program that allows educational institutions to check student term papers against previous students' papers to detect plagiarism. The students wanted their papers removed from Turnitin because no contract was ever formed to allow their papers to be posted there, that duress was involved when they clicked to submit their papers because they had no choice but to post their papers in order to turn them in, and that they were minors and could not make valid contracts. Are the students correct? Or was there a valid contract? [ A.V. ex rel. Vanderhye v. iParadigms, LLC , 544 F. Supp. 2d 473 (E.D. Va. 2008), reversed on other grounds, 562 F.3d 630 (4th Cir. 2009).]