If you’ve written a college paper in the last five years, chances are you know all about Turnitin.com. It’s a service that allows educators to screen student’s writings against a database for plagiarism, and now it’s the target of a lawsuit. By students.

High school students in Virginia and Arizona copyrighted their works before turning them into their teachers. They asked that they not be archived by Turnitin. According to a Washington Post story, the papers were added to the database. The students say that’s a violation of their copyright, um, rights.

The suit will test a system used by educational institutions all over the world, one that places no faith in students. Cheating happens in every school. Kids copy math homework, lift passages from essays and sneak a peak at their neighbor’s scantron during tests. It happens.

Instead of instilling students with a sense of accountability and personal pride—you’re only cheating yourself!—educators turn instead to systems like Turnitin as a panacea, wipe their hands of responsibility approach to the problem. What happens is sometimes good kids get accused of cheating when their writing happens to feature a string of words “too close” to one of the millions of papers already in the database. It doesn’t matter what relationship the kid may have with his teacher, how honest they are known to be. The system says they’re wrong, so they’re wrong.

The students filing the suit found a way to fight back. By copyrighting their work, they protected themselves from another entity making financial gain off of the students’ intellectual property. They are suing for $150,000 for each of the six papers they say were added to the Turnitin database. Since Turnitin charges a fee for institutions to use the database, they are, in turn, making money off of the kids’ intellectual property.

We’ll see how it plays out.