Afternoon WB, hey everyone,
In answer to your question, WB:
WritersBeware: "Why would an essay company that thrives on selling essays make an anti-essay-selling, plagiarism-detection site that is FREE to the public?"
It's very simple. Good marketing is about building relationships with current and future customers. When people sign up to use Viper and/or Raptor, they provide their email address and consent for us to contact them. And indeed, we do - to promote our other services. Of course, they can opt out of those mails at any time.
In answer to your other points:
WritersBeware: 1. The owner of Raptor is "Academic Answers Limited," a UK company owned by Barclay Littlewood and notoriously marketed in this forum by his cohort, "Jennifer."
That's right, we own both Viper and Raptor. We don't exactly hide that - they are freely advertised on all of our websites.
WritersBeware: 2. The owner of ScanMyEssay.com, the non-essay-selling site that markets Raptor, is also "Academic Answers Limited."
Top marks again!
WritersBeware: 3. The owner of the UKEssays.com essay bank is, once again, "Academic Answers Limited."
And again yes! The 'essay bank' which we don't actively promote any more, but which is live on some of our websites, does indeed (oddly enough) belong to us.
WritersBeware: 4. UKEssays.com falsely claims that it is does NOT have an essay bank, currently advertising, "We're not a paper mill, essay bank or essay cheats service."
Not falsely, WB. We don't own anything that is an 'essay bank' in the conventional sense! There's certainly no bank of our past custom essays anywhere. If you'd spent a little less time with your print screen button and actually trialled the 'essay bank', you'd see that actually, it's just a tool that allows students to market their own essays to the public :-) You'll see we haven't personally added any essays to it in the past two years (bar maybe one or two of my own first year essays as a test!), and have no intention of doing so. We called it an essay bank so people would understand what it was for (searching for past prewritten papers). An alternative name would have been "Facility where you can sell your past papers to other students" but we didn't feel this was quite as catchy.
We don't actively promote the facility any more - I'm not even sure if it's linked from our menus - because it wasn't particularly popular, and we did have a concern that visitors (like yourself) may misunderstand what the bank was about.
WritersBeware: Contrary to what the UKEssays.com site now conveniently claims, it absolutely IS an essay bank. In fact, its dedicated "Essay Bank" section is located on the following page: ukessays.com/essay-bank.php
Thanks for the promotion :-) Users of EssayScam are welcome to go and visit the bank and verify that this isn't an 'essay bank' that we use to sell essays to students - but merely a tool where students sell their *own* essays. It just connects people - people who want to sell their past papers, and other people who want to buy them.
WritersBeware: Not surprisingly, the disclaimer at ScanMyEssay.com does NOT inform potential users that Academic Answers Limited owns essay banks, including but not limited to UKEssays.com. However, the very same disclaimer DOES, quite carefully and explicitly, afford ScanMyEssay.com the LEGAL PROTECTION to publish, commercialize, and repeatedly sell YOUR papers—forever—without paying you a penny!
Really? I don't get that from the terms!
ScanMyEssay, Viper, Raptor and the 'essay bank' tool are unrelated. If students who use Viper or Raptor are concerned, I suggest they search the 'essay bank' for their papers and hey, they won't find them. Why? Because (once again, just to be clear) the so called 'essay bank' is just a tool for students to sell their own work to other students.
Look, employing very simple logic (just in case you're lost here) - if we did indeed use students' essays in the essay bank then why is it we don't have a bank of over a million essays there? Because Viper and Raptor between them have scanned over a million papers. Also WB, I don't know if you own a business but come on, honestly, do you think anyone with an ounce of business sense would do what you're proposing - don't you think students would get just a tiny bit narked if they handed in their scanned paper and it was flagged for appearing in our so called 'essay bank'? Can you imagine the headlines - thousands of students all over the UK kicked out of uni for plagiarism charges? Which would point straight back to us? The idea is just ridiculous. We wouldn't be a multi million pound enterprise if our directors thought this way.
WritersBeware: By using the RAPTOR software you acknowledge that Academic Answers Limited will retain any document processed by the program for the purpose of marketing RAPTOR or any associated website of the Company [including, but not limited to, the Company's essay bank at UKEssays.com] and you agree that any right you may have to remuneration for the use of documents to which you hold the copyright is waived.
(etc etc)
We retain documents to scan against other documents, just like TurnItIn. This gives the user a better result - a more accurate plagiarism scan - because it's not possible to put every book and journal into the scanner's database but because thousands of students use and quote from books and journals, their work expands the database - they contribute to making the software that they use better for everyone. Nobody else can see their work, except any small sections that are flagged as duplicate in a scan (and it is of course anonymous. Of course, unlike TurnItIn, we don't charge for the use of our software.
I appreciate the promotion you've given ScanMyEssay, WB and it's great to have the opportunity to address concerns that some of our visitors may have shared but at the end of the day, if you want to play Columbo, you'd save yourself a lot of embarrassment if you got your facts straight!
If anyone has any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to let me know.
All the best,
Jennifer :-)
|