This raises an interesting question about MOOCs for me. Several people here are objected to violating the terms of a free online course. At what point is it ok

This raises an interesting question about MOOCs for me. Several people here are objected to violating the terms of a free online course. At what point is it ok to start creating derivative works? I've noticed many of the comments discuss etiquette or ethics "what's right is right", rather than legality. The whole question is interesting to me. I actually do think that one of the drawbacks of Andrew Ng's course is that it uses octave rather than python. My point here isn't to kick off another debate about this topic - there have been plenty of those already. Rather, let's start with the assumption that it is reasonable for someone to feel that the course is brilliant, but would be improved by the option to do the assignments in python. As it is acceptable by the terms of the site to audit the class for free (no credit is given), many people have chosen to quietly do the exercise on their own in python. At some point, they may want to get together to share, discuss, correct, and debate their solutions - and for these discussions to happen properly, this must involve sharing code. A lot of good could emerge from something like this. I suppose you could say "then create your own course", but that comes with some issues of its own. First, the course is a classic - it was one of most famous early MOOCs, and it is a seminal course in machine learning generally. Under certain rules, it's ok to create derivative works of art from the public domain, and it's even ok to create derivative works of art from copyrighted material, provided you follow certain restrictions and abide by a (fairly complicated, inanal) set of royalty sharing regulations. This is just a thesis, and I'm sorting it through mentally, so I don't want to come off as pushing any particular solution or angle here... but I am leaning toward the notion that 1) original content creators for online courses need to be credited, and in some cases paid, for their work, and 2) restrictions on creating derivative works from these courses may be very harmful, especially if they get to the point where simply re-implenting things in a different language and sharing the solutions (in ways that are essential for meaningful discussion) is disallowed legally or through etiquette or custom. Well, that's about it, I'd be interested in hearing thoughts on this. NOTE: I do want to be clear, this is a general question prompted by this discussion - the site in question is not a place where people post and share solutions to problems for a coursera course.