Pay to Win: Copyright Infringement and Academic Integrity Violation in Crowdsourced Document-Sharing Ecosystems

Abstract

Recently, crowdsourced academic document-sharing websites like Course Hero have been arousing controversy among media, students, and faculty. In this paper, we investigate the growth of these platforms and how they infringe on the copyright of university educators and aid in academic integrity violations of students. We collected and analyzed the metadata of over 227,000 documents shared on three popular platforms, including Course Hero, Docsity, and StuDocu, and found that Course Hero was the largest. Focusing on Course Hero, we then conducted two user studies (n=56) and (n=153) with university educators. The first study analyzed Course Hero's impact on copyright and academic integrity violations. The second study examined the motivation behind faculty affiliation with Course Hero as "Verified Educators." Our results show that Course Hero has been growing exponentially since its inception. The results also highlight educators' general opposition to students' use of these platforms to gain an unfair advantage in coursework while acknowledging some alternative legitimate uses of these platforms. We show that educators create their own profiles on these platforms to identify copyrighted materials or initiate document takedown requests. However, educators do not always have copyright claims on concerning documents, and the takedown process is considered overwhelming. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings and directions for future research.