8 ms·

University of Illinois issues DMCA takedown for previous years' homework

73 points by ecaron 12y ago

comboy 12y ago
Seems a bit weird to me that university has copyright over homework done by students (which is my understanding because otherwise this DMCA would be baseless). It hasn't been the case at my university.
- bartbes 12y ago
  "a large portion of the uploaded code is copyrighted by the University of Illinois." seems to suggest the homework involved working on an existing codebase.
  - spacemanmatt 12y ago
    To me it says they assert copyright over a large portion, but I would look for something more firm on actual copyright status of uploaded code. Other schools apparently use stub code for assignments so classwork is derivative, but I haven't seen that is the case here.
- yoshuaw 12y ago
  Many universities have this policy, but given that students have to pay (!) to enroll in a university it strikes me as odd that the university would then presume to take control of all the work they produce.
  - hyperbovine 12y ago
    "Control of all the work they produce" is an exaggeration. The University asserts copyright to the boilerplate code on which these assignments are based. Nobody claims to own your sophomore year English essays.
  - bunderbunder 12y ago
    As a method of preventing plagiarism, it makes sense. Getting the copyright for the code into the university's possession gives them legal standing to do things like this. Ideally, of course, there'd be a process for getting exemptions - I know I would have been irate if my alma mater had claimed ownership of the year's worth of work I spent on my senior thesis project. But that's also code where the risk of plagiarism is relatively low-impact, what with it being specific to that particular project. Answers to problem sets, though? Pfft, let them have it. I never had a reason to look at any of it ever again, so the value of retaining ownership to me is virtually nil. Whereas the value of having even a slight incremental improvement in the protections universities use to help me not have to spend quite so much time worrying about whether the kids I'm looking at hiring might have cheated their way through college without ever picking up proper problem-solving skills? Priceless.
    - dalke 12y ago
      "Getting the copyright for the code into the university's possession" There is no copyright transfer agreement nor is this a work for hire. This case at UIUC appears to be a copyright issue related to school provided materials which were further modified by the students.
- mdasen 12y ago
  In CS assignments, there's usually a good amount of starter code that would be copyrighted by the university. As the takedown notices states, "a large portion of the uploaded code is copyrighted by the University of Illinois". It doesn't claim copyright over the student's work, but the portion of the code that is under their copyright.
  - comboy 12y ago
    OK, yes that makes more sense. I guess students should then learn to only upload parts coded by them? ;)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- dalke 12y ago
  It appears that the students started with a school provided template, then modified it to give the solutions. Consider: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KmeV5zeMhw4J:https://github.com/AdonisSaveYourLife/cs241_mps/blob/master/ds1/btree.c+&cd=2&hl=sv&ct=clnk&gl=se http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KmeV5ze... /** * Initializes the binary tree data structure. * * You may assume that: * - This is the first function called for each instance of btree_t. * - The btree_t pointer is a valid, non-NULL pointer. * * @param b * A pointer to the binary tree data structure. */ void btree_init(btree_t *b) { }
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  Happens quite often actually - there's been plenty of cases where a student made something for a school assignment, but wasn't allowed (somehow) to turn that into a business because the code legally belongs to the school. Most companies have a similar clause in their contracts (i.e. anything you write during working hours belongs to the company)
- philjohn 12y ago
  My final year project had a stipulation - if you took the output to market, the university would get 50%, your academic advisor 25% and you "get" to keep 25%.
  - zerohp 12y ago
    Oddly enough, University of Illinois makes an IP claim exception for the ECE senior design. Students own 100%. The only exception is if the student team has help from a professor or research group that is outside the normal labs and tools offered by the class.
madaxe_again 12y ago
This doesn't strike me as unreasonable, given that they likely maintain the same syllabus for a number of years, and having multiple solutions for academic assignments out there in the wild will encourage less diligent students to neglect their own education. There's also the question of plagiarism. As an undergrad, I'd often post my work on my site when I handed it in. I stopped this practice when I got a 0 on a major bit of coursework (cost me a grade boundary in my degree...), as their software found it online, on my site, and they refused to view my work as anything but plagiarism. This action potentially saves students from the same fate.
- silveira 12y ago
  That's a problem, but not a DMCA problem.
  - voidlogic 12y ago
    >but not a DMCA problem. They do claim this: a large portion of the uploaded code is copyrighted by the University of Illinois. Therefore, the repositories identified below constitute a violation of U.S. Copyright laws, in particular section(s) 1201(a)(2) and/or 1201(b)(1) of Title 17 of the United States Code, commonly referred to as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or "DMCA". What do you think about that?
    - LLWM 12y ago
      If it's true, then this is proper use of the DMCA. The code itself is no longer visible so nobody here can say for sure.
      - _lce0 12y ago
        here there is a repo, public accesible -- although I can't be sure they are related https://github.com/BtXin/cs241_mps https://github.com/BtXin/cs241_mps
- akerl_ 12y ago
  It seems fairly clear that the repos listed violate the ethical rules that the university has set, and it's entirely possible that it will aid plagiarists. That said, the DMCA does not prohibit students from encouraging others to neglect their own education, it exists to enforce copyright. IANAL, but their case that they own the copyright over the repos because their syllabus includes the questions being solved doesn't seem very solid.
punkcoder 12y ago
So are they attempting to say that the work done by students as a form of homework, is actually the property of the university?
- clock86 12y ago
  No, often when assignments are given out you'll also give students large chunks of code or libraries to modify or work with. The DMCA says that is what the infringement is.
  - jabagawee 12y ago
    Would a diff/patch be DMCA-proof then? Or would it fall under derivative works?
    - clock86 12y ago
      I'm guessing it is more likely that these repositories were searched for by staff/professors than fully specific code was searched for. I don't think you can claim that changing code absolves you of copyright issues, it might make it harder to find though.
      - lmm 12y ago
        APIs shouldn't be copyrightable as they're necessary for interfacing. The solution to a homework problem shouldn't be a derivative work of the problem, and so it should be possible to distribute the solution in a way that doesn't infringe on the university's copyright.
akerl_ 12y ago
Is anybody aware of the reasoning behind the redacted links? It looks like only one past DMCA in this repo has received similar treatment: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/4e465059012c946abd3f2fa2cc1633cdd20fe2cc/2014-10-08-CS225.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/4e465059012c946abd3f2fa2... Their README suggests they only redact personally identifying info, but I assumed that was in reference to the submitter (if an individual), as the other repos didn't receive any redaction.
steven2012 12y ago
What this is is an instance of an institution that doesn't want to create a new syllabus every year. Students pay tens of thousands of dollars for a modern education but the instructors simply rely on years old assignments year after year. And somehow this are worried about ethics? Is it really that hard or asking too much for this lazy department to tweak the code so that it's different from prior years?
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  Maybe. Point is, people posted their homework online, allowing others - also during the same year - to just copy the work. They could do that offline too, but either way it's just not cool. The students in question should probably be reprimanded as well if they were told it wasn't permitted to post the solutions online. We have an assessment as part of our hiring process, there too it's not permitted by applicants to make their solutions public - and making a new assignment would cost us a lot of money in terms of lost billable hours, especially if it would have to be done for every applicant.
- aet 12y ago
  I'm not a teacher, but I can tell you they already have enough work without having to redo their assignments every year.
  - learnstats2 12y ago
    I am a teacher, and I consider it a bad education policy to redact previous work. Students can, should, and frequently do, use past assignments as a learning resource.
    - ianamartin 12y ago
      I agree completely. I didn't go to school for computer science or anything fancy like that. I studied Music Theory. Frankly, I think those luddites in the music building have done a pretty good job of tackling the plagiarism problem, and it's something that can be learned from by others. At the beginning stages of a music theory course, you are learning the very basic rules. How did Bach's music work? That's where pretty much everyone starts. And you learn how his music worked by finishing his stuff. The early exercises (which I think are analogous here to having some code or library provided) are basically, "Here's the first part of a piece of music by Bach. Finish it in the style of Bach." Then you go from there, gradually, with less and less hand-holding. Is it possible to plagiarize these things? Of course! You can just look up the piece and finish it the way that Bach did. There are some students who did things like that. The professors never bothered to say anything. They didn't have to. Because by the end of the class, you are all on your own. "Write a short piece of music in the style of Bach with the following features: . . . ."
belorn 12y ago
The DMCA notice is likely incomplete. "a large portion of the uploaded code" can not in any reasonable way be specific enough to identify the infringing material. Thanks to it being incomplete, the owner of the github accounts can not create a defense, nor try make any changes for compliance. That should be a clear sign that the notice is unreasonable vague in the description and thus need to be denied until a complete notice has been sent.
colechristensen 12y ago
It would likely be trivial to win on the grounds of fair use for educational purposes. Upper education that relies on graded homework is, in my opinion, broken anyway. In engineering, my greatest course experiences were those where the answers were given in full when the exercises were assigned. The feedback you get by checking yourself while you are doing the work is immensely more valuable than getting graded papers returned weeks after you've done them. This, of course, allows people who don't want to learn to avoid learning, but it's the university's job to certify that you have learned things and make available the resources to learn. Policing you to learn with the graded assignments game leads to a lot of people who are really good at playing, not so good at having interest in their work or the actual material. (I knew so many people who succeeded through grey-ethical finding answers through peers and instructor's guides ... 10 people collaborating to each to 1/10th of the assignment, etc.)
sjreese 12y ago
The University has no ownership?? Does the Public library have ownership if I build a program based on a book "CS241 System Programming - Here and Now" .. The Preferssor has not written or updated the work of Mr Chou - and therefore has no standing as to DMCA - It's all a UofI Buff - and GitHub folded .. https://github.com/mukichou/cs241-2 https://github.com/mukichou/cs241-2
Ledyard 12y ago
The DMCA is only to get the repos down. This is more of a service issue where the University probably doesn't provide a standard git repo so students need to either set one up or have fun merging by hand. Unfortunately they have chosen a public GitHub repo rather than a private repo like BitBucket. Really if the class they're in provided a git repo they wouldn't have this issue.
calibwam 12y ago
As this is an issue of copyright violation, I don't have any issue with this. A DMCA complaint fixes just this. A few years ago I got an email from a TA in a subject I took the year before, that they wanted me to take down solutions I hosted on Github. However, there was no provided code in the assignment, and it was basically implementations of previously known algorithms (A* among others). Not a formal takedown request, but they said I should understand that they had to use the same assignments each year, and if I were providing solutions this could be hard. My answer was that if they are worried about plagiarism, it's better that my solutions are public, as they can be checked against.
- lmm 12y ago
  It's not a copyright violation though, or at least not inherently. The statement of a homework problem is essentially an API, and if those are copyrightable then we're in big trouble as an industry.
  - calibwam 12y ago
    Well, we can't see the code that is taken down here, but if assignment had a lot of set up code, and the assignment was to fill in some functions, there can be a copyright violation. If these repositories only included student made code, then I agree that there is a problem.
    - nickofbh 12y ago
      I'm a student in CS@Illinois and I took this class last semester. For assignment one, they gave us a library and the following where we had to make a working shell (sorry for formatting): / @file shell.c / #include <stdio.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/wait.h> #include <unistd.h> #include "log.h" log_t Log; /** * * Starting point for shell. * */ int main(int argc, char ** argv) { /** * * Analyze command line arguments * */ while(1) { /** * * Print a command prompt * */ /** * * Read the commands * */ /** * * Print the PID of the process executing the command * */ /** * * Decide which actions to take based on the command (exit, run program, etc.) * */ } return 0; } The provided code is rather sparse (by design), but the University holds copyright on it.
moosey 12y ago
I'm just jealous that university students these days have git. I had to walk through the snow uphills both ways while I was working on my CS degree.
- spacemanmatt 12y ago
  Or even Google, for that matter. Remember libraries?
ianamartin 12y ago
Seems to me that a university's computer science department should have a better way to deal with plagiarism than this. From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8806910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8806910 there's a link to http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/ http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/ and I quote: ''' How to cheat in this class I've caught so many attempts at cheating in my courses that I feel the need to provide a guide to students. You may not use code you found on the web, even if modified. You may not use code you found on the web, even if it's GPL'd. Do not turn in code with a matching md5sum for your friend's assignment. You can't simply change comments and spacing. I can tokenize your input to eliminate these differences. You can't just change variable names. I'm going to diff a token stream of your assignment against others. You can't just move definitions around. Same reason as before. You can't copy only part of an assignment. Same reason as before. If you're going to cheat, you need to rewrite the assignment from scratch. '''
- bumeye 12y ago
  Yes it's common to have software which can find plagiarism like that. However, if the student actually does these things (change all variable names and move code around) it will be hard for an examination board to decide whether this is a false positive or real plagiarism.
danielnaab 12y ago
Sharing of previous semester code (or quizzes, exams, etc) should enhance the learning process, not hinder it. This is a bad and lazy policy for a school. Instructors should be creating assignments that cover the same material but are sufficiently different from one semester to the next that cheating isn't a problem. When I was in school 15+ years ago, we had officially sanctioned ways of sharing materials from previous semesters of coursework. Is that uncommon?
jsaxton86 12y ago
This seems reasonable to me. Pretty much every academic code of conduct requires students not to publish solutions to homework problems. This doesn't prevent the use of git, just git public repositories. Rather than just issue DMCA takedown notices, it might be useful for the University of Illinois to provide students with access to private git repositories. Of course, I suspect many students have drank the "github is your resume" kool-aid and would be less likely to use private repositories.
spacemanmatt 12y ago
Seems like a reasonable way to even the playing field between independent students and members of academic and social fraternities, which traditionally handed down homework and intelligence on professors that was extremely valuable to a busy student.
nickofbh 12y ago
I can speak to this since I actually took this class last semester (Fall 2014). Homework boilerplate is distributed to students through private SVN. This typically includes some method headers or libraries. We then complete the assignment to specifications and commit it through SVN, where it is graded programmatically. Therefore, we can't modify some of the headers. The class has been taken over by a new professor. As such, it is being totally restructured and the assignments are largely being changed now. However, when I took the class with 250+ other students, plagiarism was rampant. As far as I'm aware, the course staff has indeed contacted individual repo owners on Github for take down.
sprkyco 12y ago
At my university we reviewed and assessed each others code to identify issues and help each other out. It is possible that I am misunderstanding if this applicable for this specific course. My presumption is that a vast majority of students are going to school to acquire gainful employment and jobs often require some level of code reviewing. While I do not support direct copying of someone else's homework or the distribution of a github link containing the answers to homework to students (this did not happen here but would be evidence of assisting cheating). It seems that the benefits of teaching students about version control and in depth peer code review outweigh the negative consequences of this type of "cheating". ianamartin earlier in this thread provided this link: http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/ http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/ which is honestly the "best" solution to this particular issue.
nadams 12y ago
Disclaimer: I went through college and currently teach part time. I wish something like github was around when I was in college - I only got into self-hosted SVN repos near my senior years. As a professor - I believe in transparency when it comes to my classes. tl;dr; What should have happened is that UofI should have worked with github to turn those repos into (free) private ones. That way the content is removed from the public and search indexes and the students can still use/review the material they created in the class later on if they want to. I have only taught 3 classes/2 subjects - object oriented (heavy programming), and operating systems (light usage). I run my own source code hosting service and will pre-provision private repos for them (for free obviously). I also encourage them to get private repos from github (you can get it for free if you need it for a class) if they don't like mine (I am not one of those teachers who force them to use their book or service - students are free to use whatever resource they want....just maybe not CVS or RCS...). I strongly recommend private because obviously I don't want other students to copy their work (but I do encourage collaboration for homework). However, most of my assignments are pretty open-ended to the point where I would notice obvious plagiarism. A few students have created public git repos because they aren't familiar with github or even git - which I am perfectly fine with. I would rather change my assignments than force a student to take down their git repo (which I should probably do anyways). The last thing that I would want is for a student to have a negative association with using source code hosting services like github. Some comments suggest that the university may claim ownership over the code - which may be BS depending on how the code was acquired. The university may have paid some guy off the street to write this code and the university hired a professor and said "you will use this code to teach your class". If this was the case - then I could be ok with this takedown. If a professor wrote it in their spare time for the class and the university is trying to claim ownership - then I have a problem with it. This does make me wonder - how many students requested private repos for their classes and shoved the code there? They won't have their code taken down obviously - so the only people who are punished are those trying to learn and understand the class and git/github.
- Aradalf 12y ago
  Also the ones who want their code in a public repo so that future employers can review it.
lettergram 12y ago
Kind of amazing this is against the universities own stance on copyright ownership: "Works created independently and at the student’s own initiative for traditional academic purposes are owned by the student, but the University retains certain rights to use such works. These include class notes, reports, papers, and works prepared by the student as part of the requirements for a University degree, such as a thesis or dissertation. Note that it is the copyright only that is owned by the student. The fact that the student owns the copyright does not influence whether or not the student owns the underlying intellectual property. For example, if a thesis describes research performed in a professor’s laboratory, the University has a right to own the underlying intellectual property (e.g. laboratory notebooks, original records of the research and any resulting inventions or software.)" http://otm.illinois.edu/studentownership http://otm.illinois.edu/studentownership

73 points by ecaron 12y ago

Seems a bit weird to me that university has copyright over homework done by students (which is my understanding because otherwise this DMCA would be baseless). It hasn't been the case at my university.

bartbes 12y ago
"a large portion of the uploaded code is copyrighted by the University of Illinois." seems to suggest the homework involved working on an existing codebase.
- spacemanmatt 12y ago
  To me it says they assert copyright over a large portion, but I would look for something more firm on actual copyright status of uploaded code. Other schools apparently use stub code for assignments so classwork is derivative, but I haven't seen that is the case here.
yoshuaw 12y ago
Many universities have this policy, but given that students have to pay (!) to enroll in a university it strikes me as odd that the university would then presume to take control of all the work they produce.
- hyperbovine 12y ago
  "Control of all the work they produce" is an exaggeration. The University asserts copyright to the boilerplate code on which these assignments are based. Nobody claims to own your sophomore year English essays.
- bunderbunder 12y ago
  As a method of preventing plagiarism, it makes sense. Getting the copyright for the code into the university's possession gives them legal standing to do things like this. Ideally, of course, there'd be a process for getting exemptions - I know I would have been irate if my alma mater had claimed ownership of the year's worth of work I spent on my senior thesis project. But that's also code where the risk of plagiarism is relatively low-impact, what with it being specific to that particular project. Answers to problem sets, though? Pfft, let them have it. I never had a reason to look at any of it ever again, so the value of retaining ownership to me is virtually nil. Whereas the value of having even a slight incremental improvement in the protections universities use to help me not have to spend quite so much time worrying about whether the kids I'm looking at hiring might have cheated their way through college without ever picking up proper problem-solving skills? Priceless.
  - dalke 12y ago
    "Getting the copyright for the code into the university's possession" There is no copyright transfer agreement nor is this a work for hire. This case at UIUC appears to be a copyright issue related to school provided materials which were further modified by the students.
mdasen 12y ago
In CS assignments, there's usually a good amount of starter code that would be copyrighted by the university. As the takedown notices states, "a large portion of the uploaded code is copyrighted by the University of Illinois". It doesn't claim copyright over the student's work, but the portion of the code that is under their copyright.
- comboy 12y ago
  OK, yes that makes more sense. I guess students should then learn to only upload parts coded by them? ;)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dalke 12y ago
It appears that the students started with a school provided template, then modified it to give the solutions. Consider: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KmeV5zeMhw4J:https://github.com/AdonisSaveYourLife/cs241_mps/blob/master/ds1/btree.c+&cd=2&hl=sv&ct=clnk&gl=se http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KmeV5ze... /** * Initializes the binary tree data structure. * * You may assume that: * - This is the first function called for each instance of btree_t. * - The btree_t pointer is a valid, non-NULL pointer. * * @param b * A pointer to the binary tree data structure. */ void btree_init(btree_t *b) { }
Cthulhu_ 12y ago
Happens quite often actually - there's been plenty of cases where a student made something for a school assignment, but wasn't allowed (somehow) to turn that into a business because the code legally belongs to the school. Most companies have a similar clause in their contracts (i.e. anything you write during working hours belongs to the company)
philjohn 12y ago
My final year project had a stipulation - if you took the output to market, the university would get 50%, your academic advisor 25% and you "get" to keep 25%.
- zerohp 12y ago
  Oddly enough, University of Illinois makes an IP claim exception for the ECE senior design. Students own 100%. The only exception is if the student team has help from a professor or research group that is outside the normal labs and tools offered by the class.

madaxe_again 12y ago

This doesn't strike me as unreasonable, given that they likely maintain the same syllabus for a number of years, and having multiple solutions for academic assignments out there in the wild will encourage less diligent students to neglect their own education. There's also the question of plagiarism. As an undergrad, I'd often post my work on my site when I handed it in. I stopped this practice when I got a 0 on a major bit of coursework (cost me a grade boundary in my degree...), as their software found it online, on my site, and they refused to view my work as anything but plagiarism. This action potentially saves students from the same fate.

silveira 12y ago
That's a problem, but not a DMCA problem.
- voidlogic 12y ago
  >but not a DMCA problem. They do claim this: a large portion of the uploaded code is copyrighted by the University of Illinois. Therefore, the repositories identified below constitute a violation of U.S. Copyright laws, in particular section(s) 1201(a)(2) and/or 1201(b)(1) of Title 17 of the United States Code, commonly referred to as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or "DMCA". What do you think about that?
  - LLWM 12y ago
    If it's true, then this is proper use of the DMCA. The code itself is no longer visible so nobody here can say for sure.
    - _lce0 12y ago
      here there is a repo, public accesible -- although I can't be sure they are related https://github.com/BtXin/cs241_mps https://github.com/BtXin/cs241_mps
akerl_ 12y ago
It seems fairly clear that the repos listed violate the ethical rules that the university has set, and it's entirely possible that it will aid plagiarists. That said, the DMCA does not prohibit students from encouraging others to neglect their own education, it exists to enforce copyright. IANAL, but their case that they own the copyright over the repos because their syllabus includes the questions being solved doesn't seem very solid.

punkcoder 12y ago

So are they attempting to say that the work done by students as a form of homework, is actually the property of the university?

clock86 12y ago
No, often when assignments are given out you'll also give students large chunks of code or libraries to modify or work with. The DMCA says that is what the infringement is.
- jabagawee 12y ago
  Would a diff/patch be DMCA-proof then? Or would it fall under derivative works?
  - clock86 12y ago
    I'm guessing it is more likely that these repositories were searched for by staff/professors than fully specific code was searched for. I don't think you can claim that changing code absolves you of copyright issues, it might make it harder to find though.
    - lmm 12y ago
      APIs shouldn't be copyrightable as they're necessary for interfacing. The solution to a homework problem shouldn't be a derivative work of the problem, and so it should be possible to distribute the solution in a way that doesn't infringe on the university's copyright.

akerl_ 12y ago

Is anybody aware of the reasoning behind the redacted links? It looks like only one past DMCA in this repo has received similar treatment: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/4e465059012c946abd3f2fa2cc1633cdd20fe2cc/2014-10-08-CS225.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/4e465059012c946abd3f2fa2... Their README suggests they only redact personally identifying info, but I assumed that was in reference to the submitter (if an individual), as the other repos didn't receive any redaction.

steven2012 12y ago

What this is is an instance of an institution that doesn't want to create a new syllabus every year. Students pay tens of thousands of dollars for a modern education but the instructors simply rely on years old assignments year after year. And somehow this are worried about ethics? Is it really that hard or asking too much for this lazy department to tweak the code so that it's different from prior years?

Cthulhu_ 12y ago
Maybe. Point is, people posted their homework online, allowing others - also during the same year - to just copy the work. They could do that offline too, but either way it's just not cool. The students in question should probably be reprimanded as well if they were told it wasn't permitted to post the solutions online. We have an assessment as part of our hiring process, there too it's not permitted by applicants to make their solutions public - and making a new assignment would cost us a lot of money in terms of lost billable hours, especially if it would have to be done for every applicant.
aet 12y ago
I'm not a teacher, but I can tell you they already have enough work without having to redo their assignments every year.
- learnstats2 12y ago
  I am a teacher, and I consider it a bad education policy to redact previous work. Students can, should, and frequently do, use past assignments as a learning resource.
  - ianamartin 12y ago
    I agree completely. I didn't go to school for computer science or anything fancy like that. I studied Music Theory. Frankly, I think those luddites in the music building have done a pretty good job of tackling the plagiarism problem, and it's something that can be learned from by others. At the beginning stages of a music theory course, you are learning the very basic rules. How did Bach's music work? That's where pretty much everyone starts. And you learn how his music worked by finishing his stuff. The early exercises (which I think are analogous here to having some code or library provided) are basically, "Here's the first part of a piece of music by Bach. Finish it in the style of Bach." Then you go from there, gradually, with less and less hand-holding. Is it possible to plagiarize these things? Of course! You can just look up the piece and finish it the way that Bach did. There are some students who did things like that. The professors never bothered to say anything. They didn't have to. Because by the end of the class, you are all on your own. "Write a short piece of music in the style of Bach with the following features: . . . ."

belorn 12y ago

The DMCA notice is likely incomplete. "a large portion of the uploaded code" can not in any reasonable way be specific enough to identify the infringing material. Thanks to it being incomplete, the owner of the github accounts can not create a defense, nor try make any changes for compliance. That should be a clear sign that the notice is unreasonable vague in the description and thus need to be denied until a complete notice has been sent.

colechristensen 12y ago

It would likely be trivial to win on the grounds of fair use for educational purposes. Upper education that relies on graded homework is, in my opinion, broken anyway. In engineering, my greatest course experiences were those where the answers were given in full when the exercises were assigned. The feedback you get by checking yourself while you are doing the work is immensely more valuable than getting graded papers returned weeks after you've done them. This, of course, allows people who don't want to learn to avoid learning, but it's the university's job to certify that you have learned things and make available the resources to learn. Policing you to learn with the graded assignments game leads to a lot of people who are really good at playing, not so good at having interest in their work or the actual material. (I knew so many people who succeeded through grey-ethical finding answers through peers and instructor's guides ... 10 people collaborating to each to 1/10th of the assignment, etc.)

sjreese 12y ago

The University has no ownership?? Does the Public library have ownership if I build a program based on a book "CS241 System Programming - Here and Now" .. The Preferssor has not written or updated the work of Mr Chou - and therefore has no standing as to DMCA - It's all a UofI Buff - and GitHub folded .. https://github.com/mukichou/cs241-2 https://github.com/mukichou/cs241-2

Ledyard 12y ago

The DMCA is only to get the repos down. This is more of a service issue where the University probably doesn't provide a standard git repo so students need to either set one up or have fun merging by hand. Unfortunately they have chosen a public GitHub repo rather than a private repo like BitBucket. Really if the class they're in provided a git repo they wouldn't have this issue.

calibwam 12y ago

As this is an issue of copyright violation, I don't have any issue with this. A DMCA complaint fixes just this. A few years ago I got an email from a TA in a subject I took the year before, that they wanted me to take down solutions I hosted on Github. However, there was no provided code in the assignment, and it was basically implementations of previously known algorithms (A* among others). Not a formal takedown request, but they said I should understand that they had to use the same assignments each year, and if I were providing solutions this could be hard. My answer was that if they are worried about plagiarism, it's better that my solutions are public, as they can be checked against.

lmm 12y ago
It's not a copyright violation though, or at least not inherently. The statement of a homework problem is essentially an API, and if those are copyrightable then we're in big trouble as an industry.
- calibwam 12y ago
  Well, we can't see the code that is taken down here, but if assignment had a lot of set up code, and the assignment was to fill in some functions, there can be a copyright violation. If these repositories only included student made code, then I agree that there is a problem.
  - nickofbh 12y ago
    I'm a student in CS@Illinois and I took this class last semester. For assignment one, they gave us a library and the following where we had to make a working shell (sorry for formatting): / @file shell.c / #include <stdio.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/wait.h> #include <unistd.h> #include "log.h" log_t Log; /** * * Starting point for shell. * */ int main(int argc, char ** argv) { /** * * Analyze command line arguments * */ while(1) { /** * * Print a command prompt * */ /** * * Read the commands * */ /** * * Print the PID of the process executing the command * */ /** * * Decide which actions to take based on the command (exit, run program, etc.) * */ } return 0; } The provided code is rather sparse (by design), but the University holds copyright on it.

moosey 12y ago

I'm just jealous that university students these days have git. I had to walk through the snow uphills both ways while I was working on my CS degree.

spacemanmatt 12y ago
Or even Google, for that matter. Remember libraries?

ianamartin 12y ago

Seems to me that a university's computer science department should have a better way to deal with plagiarism than this. From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8806910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8806910 there's a link to http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/ http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/ and I quote: ''' How to cheat in this class I've caught so many attempts at cheating in my courses that I feel the need to provide a guide to students. You may not use code you found on the web, even if modified. You may not use code you found on the web, even if it's GPL'd. Do not turn in code with a matching md5sum for your friend's assignment. You can't simply change comments and spacing. I can tokenize your input to eliminate these differences. You can't just change variable names. I'm going to diff a token stream of your assignment against others. You can't just move definitions around. Same reason as before. You can't copy only part of an assignment. Same reason as before. If you're going to cheat, you need to rewrite the assignment from scratch. '''

bumeye 12y ago
Yes it's common to have software which can find plagiarism like that. However, if the student actually does these things (change all variable names and move code around) it will be hard for an examination board to decide whether this is a false positive or real plagiarism.

danielnaab 12y ago

Sharing of previous semester code (or quizzes, exams, etc) should enhance the learning process, not hinder it. This is a bad and lazy policy for a school. Instructors should be creating assignments that cover the same material but are sufficiently different from one semester to the next that cheating isn't a problem. When I was in school 15+ years ago, we had officially sanctioned ways of sharing materials from previous semesters of coursework. Is that uncommon?

jsaxton86 12y ago

This seems reasonable to me. Pretty much every academic code of conduct requires students not to publish solutions to homework problems. This doesn't prevent the use of git, just git public repositories. Rather than just issue DMCA takedown notices, it might be useful for the University of Illinois to provide students with access to private git repositories. Of course, I suspect many students have drank the "github is your resume" kool-aid and would be less likely to use private repositories.

spacemanmatt 12y ago

Seems like a reasonable way to even the playing field between independent students and members of academic and social fraternities, which traditionally handed down homework and intelligence on professors that was extremely valuable to a busy student.

nickofbh 12y ago

I can speak to this since I actually took this class last semester (Fall 2014). Homework boilerplate is distributed to students through private SVN. This typically includes some method headers or libraries. We then complete the assignment to specifications and commit it through SVN, where it is graded programmatically. Therefore, we can't modify some of the headers. The class has been taken over by a new professor. As such, it is being totally restructured and the assignments are largely being changed now. However, when I took the class with 250+ other students, plagiarism was rampant. As far as I'm aware, the course staff has indeed contacted individual repo owners on Github for take down.

sprkyco 12y ago

At my university we reviewed and assessed each others code to identify issues and help each other out. It is possible that I am misunderstanding if this applicable for this specific course. My presumption is that a vast majority of students are going to school to acquire gainful employment and jobs often require some level of code reviewing. While I do not support direct copying of someone else's homework or the distribution of a github link containing the answers to homework to students (this did not happen here but would be evidence of assisting cheating). It seems that the benefits of teaching students about version control and in depth peer code review outweigh the negative consequences of this type of "cheating". ianamartin earlier in this thread provided this link: http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/ http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/ which is honestly the "best" solution to this particular issue.

nadams 12y ago

Disclaimer: I went through college and currently teach part time. I wish something like github was around when I was in college - I only got into self-hosted SVN repos near my senior years. As a professor - I believe in transparency when it comes to my classes. tl;dr; What should have happened is that UofI should have worked with github to turn those repos into (free) private ones. That way the content is removed from the public and search indexes and the students can still use/review the material they created in the class later on if they want to. I have only taught 3 classes/2 subjects - object oriented (heavy programming), and operating systems (light usage). I run my own source code hosting service and will pre-provision private repos for them (for free obviously). I also encourage them to get private repos from github (you can get it for free if you need it for a class) if they don't like mine (I am not one of those teachers who force them to use their book or service - students are free to use whatever resource they want....just maybe not CVS or RCS...). I strongly recommend private because obviously I don't want other students to copy their work (but I do encourage collaboration for homework). However, most of my assignments are pretty open-ended to the point where I would notice obvious plagiarism. A few students have created public git repos because they aren't familiar with github or even git - which I am perfectly fine with. I would rather change my assignments than force a student to take down their git repo (which I should probably do anyways). The last thing that I would want is for a student to have a negative association with using source code hosting services like github. Some comments suggest that the university may claim ownership over the code - which may be BS depending on how the code was acquired. The university may have paid some guy off the street to write this code and the university hired a professor and said "you will use this code to teach your class". If this was the case - then I could be ok with this takedown. If a professor wrote it in their spare time for the class and the university is trying to claim ownership - then I have a problem with it. This does make me wonder - how many students requested private repos for their classes and shoved the code there? They won't have their code taken down obviously - so the only people who are punished are those trying to learn and understand the class and git/github.

Aradalf 12y ago
Also the ones who want their code in a public repo so that future employers can review it.

lettergram 12y ago

Kind of amazing this is against the universities own stance on copyright ownership: "Works created independently and at the student’s own initiative for traditional academic purposes are owned by the student, but the University retains certain rights to use such works. These include class notes, reports, papers, and works prepared by the student as part of the requirements for a University degree, such as a thesis or dissertation. Note that it is the copyright only that is owned by the student. The fact that the student owns the copyright does not influence whether or not the student owns the underlying intellectual property. For example, if a thesis describes research performed in a professor’s laboratory, the University has a right to own the underlying intellectual property (e.g. laboratory notebooks, original records of the research and any resulting inventions or software.)" http://otm.illinois.edu/studentownership http://otm.illinois.edu/studentownership