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Can you DMCA a student's repo for hosting their own solution to a coding exercise? In programming books, when the exercise is often closely related to the sampl
by AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
Can you DMCA a student's repo for hosting their own solution to a coding exercise? In programming books, when the exercise is often closely related to the sample code submitted (e.g. "Exercise 3.2. Rewrite the above sample to use a for loop instead of a while loop"), I imagine a large number of independently-derived solutions might look very similar.
- codezero 10y agoI'm not 100% sure. I do know that sets of questions are able to be DMCAed, so solutions to problem sets are likely to fall under that, though IANAL. I have worked for a company that took down answers to such questions in response to a DMCA. Our lawyer pointed out a specific clause that made it risky. In almost any DMCA case, there is some set of case law that backs up one side or the other, and all you're doing is deciding whether you think the content is valuable enough to go to court over to protect. It's usually not worth going to court over :/ To be really tested, it'd have to go to court. I noticed when searching a lot of solutions were still up for this course, so maybe the solutions alone are OK, and it's only the base code being DMCAed. That said, there is a lot of base code still up too, so it's likely that this person just hasn't come around on their whack-a-mole cycle yet.
- lettergram 10y agoYes, kinda. At least UIUC did that to students who had libraries from the coding exercises. For example, the cs225 course provides an image processing library, and you need it for the assignment, so if you put the library in the repo they DMCA'd. Similarly, many courses give you a framework of code. If you filled in the framework they would DMCA. They did this a bit, but there was a pretty massive back lash. I don't think they are doing it atm