Debate about "The Essay Exchange" at the University of Virginia

The tagline at TheEssayExchange is Where College Students Get Paid for Sharing Their Successful Admissions Essays and Applicants Learn From Reading Successful Admissions Essays. Apparently, one can purchase essays used for the following schools:

Brown
Cal Tech
Carnegie Mellon
Columbia
Cornell
Dartmouth
Duke
Emory
Georgetown
Harvard
Johns Hopkins
MIT
Northwestern
Notre Dame
Princeton
Rice
Stanford
UC Berkeley
UCLA
University of Chicago
University of Virginia
UPenn
Vanderbilt
Wash U. St. Louis
Yale


Thus, a student applicant can sell an essay used for a school and another (potential) applicant can buy said essay.

Apparently, there has been some discussion of said practice at the University of Virginia. One RORY O'CONNOR has written a guest viewpoint for the Cavalier Daily which begins:

I AM A CO-FOUNDER of Acceptional, which runs The Essay Exchange, and wanted to respond to Assoc. College Dean Maurie McInnis and the recent article in The Cavalier Daily titled “Website solicits students” (March 17). Although I respect the opinions Dean McInnis has conveyed, I wanted to share Acceptional’s opinions on plagiarism and the economic inequality that exists in admissions to top schools.

In the patent business, the main benefit to society is the publication of inventions which are useful, novel, and nonobvious. In exchange for disclosing such inventions to the public, the inventors get a right to exclude for a limited time, but the public gets to learn what the invention is. If someone copies the invention without permission, the patent owner may sue them. The patent owner may be the inventor, or the owner may be someone else who has taken assignment. It doesn't matter.

In the University of Virginia debate, the UVa people seem to be concerned with the potential copying. But making information available is a different issue from someone copying that information. The fact that the US government makes inventions publicly available does not mean the US government encourages patent infringement. Quite the opposite. The publication puts people on notice not to copy.