A district court judge in Illinois has ordered the owner of a Web-based company to stop selling term papers unless he can prove he has permission from the papers’ authors.
The order was based on an earlier ruling in which the provider was found liable of copyright infringement after co-authors of an undergraduate research paper saw their work posted on three of the company’s Web sites and sued in 2006.
The case does not address whether it’s legal or ethical to sell or buy term papers, an age-old practice that has proliferated on the Internet but for the most part has dodged legal trouble. But it appears to be the first time a court has penalized a seller based on how it acquires papers.
“The opinion does help the public see some of the sharp and shady practices of at least some of these companies,” says Stetson University School of Law Dean Darby Dickerson. “The fact that someone was willing to take on the company and litigate for several years is significant.”
In a ruling on the class-action lawsuit Jan. 21, David Herndon, chief judge of a U.S. District Court in Illinois, said Rusty Carroll and his company, R2C2 Inc. of Carbondale, Ill., caused continued “irreparable harm” to an unknown number of authors.
Lawyers for the authors say they hope it has a chilling effect on other U.S.-based providers.
“We’d like to stop this practice, or get as close to stopping (it) as we can,” says attorney Eric Conn of McDermott Will & Emery in Washington, D.C. The firm is seeking compensation for its clients, which it says could number in the tens of thousands.
Carroll’s term paper business includes at least nine Web sites that together offer 200,000 to 300,000 papers, says his attorney, Hugh Williams of Carbondale. A number of the sites named in legal…