5 ms·

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 assi

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.
- LLWM 12y ago
  It's not visible due to the takedowns, but if the students are including the original copyrighted work in its entirety, with their own original additions bundled in, it seems like the DMCA should apply. That's why commentary stuff like MST3K either only distributes their own additions or pays license fees to the copyright holders.
  - akerl_ 12y ago
    Granted. In that case, this seems fairly easy for the folks who own the repos: Strip the university's IP from their code and re-release. It's a bit obnoxious because it'll gut the git history, but they have a clear path forward.
- LukeShu 12y ago
  A strategy that my university (Purdue) uses for this is to distribute some "stub" code to get you started. Beyond being there to help the students (and giving instructors an idea of the structure of your code if you need to ask for help), it also means that the university owns a portion of the copyright for on the code. In the case of TFA, UIllinois claims ownership over some of the things made by students; it's part of their conditions for enrollment. This kind of thing is more common than most people realize. http://www.bot.uillinois.edu/general-rules http://www.bot.uillinois.edu/general-rules http://otm.illinois.edu/studentownership http://otm.illinois.edu/studentownership
- Alupis 12y ago
  Which ethical rules exactly did they violate? Here is the Honor Code from the university[1] I don't see any mentions of the words "share", "distribute", "post", "online", "github", etc. What I do see, is a lot of talk about plagiarizing other student's work and passing it off as your own. The github repos did not do this -- other students did this. You punish the students who commit the act of plagiarism -- not the source. You don't ban a book because somebody plagiarized it. [1] http://cs.illinois.edu/current-students/undergraduates/policies-and-procedures-0/honor-code-and-academic-integrity http://cs.illinois.edu/current-students/undergraduates/polic...
yock 12y ago
Your second point is utterly infuriating. That an institution whose mission is to educate people would refuse to allow the observations of a person to refute the obviously incorrect observations of a machine is astounding to me.
- wsxcde 12y ago
  There's nothing infuriating about it. Students are usually prohibited from posting homeworks and/or solutions online because courses reuse material from previous years. Students can consider themselves lucky if the only fallout from this is the DMCA takedown because at Princeton this would be considered a violation of the honor code, which has very serious implications.
  - spiritplumber 12y ago
    You're missing the point... madaxe_again was disciplined for plagiarizing themself, because someone decided to ignore the reality of the software having caught madaxe_again's own website. I look forward to hearing what revenge madaxe_again exacted on the culprit. The closest thing to this that happened to me not being allowed to take a graduate-level class based on a piece of software that I helped develop, because I was an undergrad. That was dealt with by disabling said software for the instructor until the stupidity ended.
    - mister_m 12y ago
      A lot of universities have policies surrounding using work you've done for other classes in subsequent classes too. For instance, if you write a paper for one class and use it in whole, or in part in a different class. I think posting finished homework online is a silly thing to do regardless. There's no reason to do that. I'd wager students get informed of these policies well before it gets anywhere close to where this went.
      - madaxe_again 12y ago
        Nope. No such policy. They made it policy after I left.
clock86 12y ago
I think it should have been easily provable that you owned the website and that your code matched, any sort of escalation beyond initial talking with professor should have resolved that. If not that is absolutely ridiculous.
- madaxe_again 12y ago
  This was 2002. They didn't understand that people could have their own websites - they kept on going "but we did not set this up for you, there is no other way to have a website". Not in terms of regulations, but ignorance and an unwillingness to listen to a mere peasant, uh, undergraduate.
spiritplumber 12y ago
I'd have gotten hopping mad about being accused of plagiarizing myself. Then again, institutional refusal to understand reality is a pet peeve of mine.
- golemotron 12y ago
  Lessig predicted this when he said "code is law." Look at all of the craziness around youtube's content match. It's easier to put a computer in charge of decision-making regardless of the effects.
  - spiritplumber 12y ago
    A friend of mine, who is a lawyer, explained to me that Italian law holds itself to be complete and applicable to any circumstance faultlessly, at any given point in time. He agreed that this is logically absurd on its face, since Italian law is amended all the time, same as in every other country. I thanked him profusely for freeing me from bothering to follow it. I obey American law because I gave my word that I would, upon entering the country as an adult. I do not obey Italian law because the Italian state never asked me to, and even managed to fail to to secure my consent despite me offering. Due to the the aforementioned bit of utter idiocy, I consider Italian law impossible to follow, so why bother trying? If code is law, law is code, and this one is one of those things that keeps dumping a stack trace at you and clogging the logs (also, I hate debugging Android apps).
teacup50 12y ago
Publishing solutions is of benefit to both the student, and the rest of society. Education isn't a zero-sum game, so if some people want to plagiarize, aren't they just cheating themselves?
Alupis 12y ago
> will encourage less diligent students to neglect their own education. That seems like a student's issue -- not the University's. Give an in-class closed-book closed-note exam and the students who did not bother to actually learn the subject will fail. > 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 It seems you did not fight this hard enough. It would be easily proven it was your work and posted after you began work on the assignment. It's actually customary now at the local University by me for the professors to encourage use of Github and the like. In the end -- the University might "own" copyright over the exact phrasing of the questions that spawned the code solutions -- but they do not own the solutions themselves. Actively forbidding students from learning and using version control is egregious. The argument that other students might plagiarize so all the code solutions must come down is simply ridiculous. I'm also upset that Github redacts the contact information from the DCMA Takedown requester. Students should have an option to directly contact the individual at their University and challenge this. There are a lot of people in this thread stating that students are not allowed to post homework solutions online and therefore this is fair -- I have never seen in any syllabus nor student conduct agreement anything forbidding posting of a student's own solutions online. A lot of student code is online - and sometimes is even used as part of their first resume after university to land their first real job. Posting homework you did and own copyright of online is not breaking any rules. It's breaking rules to copy/plagiarize that code and attempt to pass it as your own.
- wsxcde 12y ago
  Actively forbidding students from learning and using version control is egregious. Students are definitely not forbidden from using version control. In fact, version control is encouraged. What they are forbidden from doing is making their repositories publicly viewable.
  - Alupis 12y ago
    > What they are forbidden from doing is making their repositories publicly viewable You are making a large assumption here. I have never seen this be explicitly forbidden in any syllabus nor student conduct code. You can do a search of their "Honor Code"[1] for the keywords --- "online", "post", "distribute", "share" -- none are even mentioned. I'd like to be proven wrong -- but this just seems like a fallacy. Posting code online is fine -- copying it and passing it off as your own is not. [1] http://cs.illinois.edu/current-students/undergraduates/policies-and-procedures-0/honor-code-and-academic-integrity http://cs.illinois.edu/current-students/undergraduates/polic...

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.

LLWM 12y ago
It's not visible due to the takedowns, but if the students are including the original copyrighted work in its entirety, with their own original additions bundled in, it seems like the DMCA should apply. That's why commentary stuff like MST3K either only distributes their own additions or pays license fees to the copyright holders.
- akerl_ 12y ago
  Granted. In that case, this seems fairly easy for the folks who own the repos: Strip the university's IP from their code and re-release. It's a bit obnoxious because it'll gut the git history, but they have a clear path forward.
LukeShu 12y ago
A strategy that my university (Purdue) uses for this is to distribute some "stub" code to get you started. Beyond being there to help the students (and giving instructors an idea of the structure of your code if you need to ask for help), it also means that the university owns a portion of the copyright for on the code. In the case of TFA, UIllinois claims ownership over some of the things made by students; it's part of their conditions for enrollment. This kind of thing is more common than most people realize. http://www.bot.uillinois.edu/general-rules http://www.bot.uillinois.edu/general-rules http://otm.illinois.edu/studentownership http://otm.illinois.edu/studentownership
Alupis 12y ago
Which ethical rules exactly did they violate? Here is the Honor Code from the university[1] I don't see any mentions of the words "share", "distribute", "post", "online", "github", etc. What I do see, is a lot of talk about plagiarizing other student's work and passing it off as your own. The github repos did not do this -- other students did this. You punish the students who commit the act of plagiarism -- not the source. You don't ban a book because somebody plagiarized it. [1] http://cs.illinois.edu/current-students/undergraduates/policies-and-procedures-0/honor-code-and-academic-integrity http://cs.illinois.edu/current-students/undergraduates/polic...

yock 12y ago

Your second point is utterly infuriating. That an institution whose mission is to educate people would refuse to allow the observations of a person to refute the obviously incorrect observations of a machine is astounding to me.

wsxcde 12y ago
There's nothing infuriating about it. Students are usually prohibited from posting homeworks and/or solutions online because courses reuse material from previous years. Students can consider themselves lucky if the only fallout from this is the DMCA takedown because at Princeton this would be considered a violation of the honor code, which has very serious implications.
- spiritplumber 12y ago
  You're missing the point... madaxe_again was disciplined for plagiarizing themself, because someone decided to ignore the reality of the software having caught madaxe_again's own website. I look forward to hearing what revenge madaxe_again exacted on the culprit. The closest thing to this that happened to me not being allowed to take a graduate-level class based on a piece of software that I helped develop, because I was an undergrad. That was dealt with by disabling said software for the instructor until the stupidity ended.
  - mister_m 12y ago
    A lot of universities have policies surrounding using work you've done for other classes in subsequent classes too. For instance, if you write a paper for one class and use it in whole, or in part in a different class. I think posting finished homework online is a silly thing to do regardless. There's no reason to do that. I'd wager students get informed of these policies well before it gets anywhere close to where this went.
    - madaxe_again 12y ago
      Nope. No such policy. They made it policy after I left.

clock86 12y ago

I think it should have been easily provable that you owned the website and that your code matched, any sort of escalation beyond initial talking with professor should have resolved that. If not that is absolutely ridiculous.

madaxe_again 12y ago
This was 2002. They didn't understand that people could have their own websites - they kept on going "but we did not set this up for you, there is no other way to have a website". Not in terms of regulations, but ignorance and an unwillingness to listen to a mere peasant, uh, undergraduate.

spiritplumber 12y ago

I'd have gotten hopping mad about being accused of plagiarizing myself. Then again, institutional refusal to understand reality is a pet peeve of mine.

golemotron 12y ago
Lessig predicted this when he said "code is law." Look at all of the craziness around youtube's content match. It's easier to put a computer in charge of decision-making regardless of the effects.
- spiritplumber 12y ago
  A friend of mine, who is a lawyer, explained to me that Italian law holds itself to be complete and applicable to any circumstance faultlessly, at any given point in time. He agreed that this is logically absurd on its face, since Italian law is amended all the time, same as in every other country. I thanked him profusely for freeing me from bothering to follow it. I obey American law because I gave my word that I would, upon entering the country as an adult. I do not obey Italian law because the Italian state never asked me to, and even managed to fail to to secure my consent despite me offering. Due to the the aforementioned bit of utter idiocy, I consider Italian law impossible to follow, so why bother trying? If code is law, law is code, and this one is one of those things that keeps dumping a stack trace at you and clogging the logs (also, I hate debugging Android apps).

teacup50 12y ago

Publishing solutions is of benefit to both the student, and the rest of society. Education isn't a zero-sum game, so if some people want to plagiarize, aren't they just cheating themselves?

Alupis 12y ago

> will encourage less diligent students to neglect their own education. That seems like a student's issue -- not the University's. Give an in-class closed-book closed-note exam and the students who did not bother to actually learn the subject will fail. > 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 It seems you did not fight this hard enough. It would be easily proven it was your work and posted after you began work on the assignment. It's actually customary now at the local University by me for the professors to encourage use of Github and the like. In the end -- the University might "own" copyright over the exact phrasing of the questions that spawned the code solutions -- but they do not own the solutions themselves. Actively forbidding students from learning and using version control is egregious. The argument that other students might plagiarize so all the code solutions must come down is simply ridiculous. I'm also upset that Github redacts the contact information from the DCMA Takedown requester. Students should have an option to directly contact the individual at their University and challenge this. There are a lot of people in this thread stating that students are not allowed to post homework solutions online and therefore this is fair -- I have never seen in any syllabus nor student conduct agreement anything forbidding posting of a student's own solutions online. A lot of student code is online - and sometimes is even used as part of their first resume after university to land their first real job. Posting homework you did and own copyright of online is not breaking any rules. It's breaking rules to copy/plagiarize that code and attempt to pass it as your own.

wsxcde 12y ago
Actively forbidding students from learning and using version control is egregious. Students are definitely not forbidden from using version control. In fact, version control is encouraged. What they are forbidden from doing is making their repositories publicly viewable.
- Alupis 12y ago
  > What they are forbidden from doing is making their repositories publicly viewable You are making a large assumption here. I have never seen this be explicitly forbidden in any syllabus nor student conduct code. You can do a search of their "Honor Code"[1] for the keywords --- "online", "post", "distribute", "share" -- none are even mentioned. I'd like to be proven wrong -- but this just seems like a fallacy. Posting code online is fine -- copying it and passing it off as your own is not. [1] http://cs.illinois.edu/current-students/undergraduates/policies-and-procedures-0/honor-code-and-academic-integrity http://cs.illinois.edu/current-students/undergraduates/polic...