An attorney for four Virginia high school students is appealing a federal judge’s ruling that iParadigms LLC of Oakland did not violate copyright laws when it used their work in its Turnitin database, which is used by teachers and professors to check for plagiarism. Robert Vanderhye, the lawyer who sued iParadigms on behalf of the students, is also challenging the April 9 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Claude Hilton that when the students used the company’s software they legally agreed to a contract that prevents them from suing.

The case builds on a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling last year in a case involving Google Inc. and its display of thumb-sized digital images from the adult photo Web site Perfect 10. The court considered use of these images in Google searches to be “transformative,” or sufficiently different from Perfect io’s. ‘These cases are on the forefront of decisions that are arising because of changes in technology and that people have a need to store copyrighted works, and use them and store them in their entirety,” said Jeffrey Lindgren, a partner with Morgan Miller Blair in Walnut Creek. Read more