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Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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://otm.illinois.edu/studentownership

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/polic...

From that link:

"As described in the Student Code, aiding someone else's cheating also constitutes cheating. Leaving your program in plain sight or leaving a computer without logging out, thereby leaving your programs open to copying, may constitute cheating depending upon the circumstances. Consequently, you should always take care to prevent others from copying your programs, as it certainly leaves you open to accusations of cheating."

> thereby leaving your programs open to copying, may constitute cheating depending upon the circumstances

Did the university contact each student and request to have the student remove the repo? Unlikely given the sheer volume of repos in the takedown request.

Irregardless, the University should have measures to deal with this internally if they felt so strongly about this cheating rule.

Their rules don't state that they need to. Had they chosen to enforce their ethics code internally and take internal action against the students, they'd have been within the bounds of that policy.

That said, they didn't do that: they used the DMCA. Their use of the DMCA is a strange choice in my opinion, but is likewise valid if the repos contain original work created by the university as part of the problem set.

"Irregardless" is not a word.

Merriam-Webster disagrees with you.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irregardless

"Use regardless instead."

Direct quote from your link.

They said "+a large portion of the uploaded code is copyrighted by the University of" I am assuming that they gave a framework, or something similar to use. That code was included in the repository. It sounds like DMCA us the right course of action.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nope. No such policy. They made it policy after I left.

Wsxcde is not missing the point.

Students are not allowed to post the work that they do to the Internet. madaxe_again did post the work they did to the Internet. They were incorrectly punished for plagiarism - it was their own work - but they could have been punished for posting homework to the Internet.

So yell at madaxe_again for publishing proprietary stuff, not plagiarism.

The internal justice system made two errors, not zero. That's never okay, especially if it claims to be errorless ( shawn-furyan put it better than I did)

Would you be okay with getting a fine in the mail for having done something that is logically impossible to do (such as plagiarizing from yourself), regardless if you had to pay a different fine for a different issue or not?

EDIT: I can't answer to the post below, for some reason, thanks for the correction on self plagiarism!

In the interest of accuracy: it is possible to plagiarize yourself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Self-plagiarism

It wasn't against any regulation in 2002 - but I suppose you think I deserved this because... What, I should have known that in the future it'd be against the rules? Cool logic man. Report yourself for punishment, being called Dan might be against the rules one day.

You are missing the point. Student not allowed to make their homeworks public and this is for a very good reason. It helps other students looking to plagiarize, and students have a responsibility to make a reasonable effort to prevent this. And while I can't comment on what these particular students were told, I can guarantee you that all the instructors I know make it a point to tell their students that they are not allowed to put their homeworks up online.

Another issue to consider is that the homeoworks are not student property, they largely belong to the instructor. A lot of effort goes into producing interesting and educational homeworks, and it's all lost if students can just google the answers. If you disagree with the idea that homeworks are instructor property, ask yourself if it would be okay if an instructor at Princeton just reused (without permission) the homeworks from a course at Harvard.

madaxe_again said that the University gave him a zero for plagiarizing a website when he was the one that controlled that website. Whether or not it is legitimate to post solutions online, this is not what madaxe claims to have been penalized for.

In my opinion, arbitrarily shoehorning a perceived infraction into a preexisting rule that it doesn't fit so that you can punish behavior that you hadn't thought to disallow before the fact is an abuse of university policies.

If madaxe is recounting the event accurately, then I think that the university is more in the wrong. University policies are hard enough to follow in situations like this when the university sticks to the letter of the policy. Plus, universities can always go back to update policies as they see new behaviors that they would like to disallow. But if the university uses whatever policies that they do have on the books to punish arbitrary behaviors that they don't disallow, then it puts the student in the situation of having to predict how this practice will impact them in the future. This is essentially impossible, and quite defeats the entire purpose of having policies written down in the first place. If this practice is common, then the policies are merely legitimacy theater, and are in fact illegitimate.

The situation is further confounded by the power dynamics at play. Tanking a students GPA is a pretty tremendous bludgeon, and outside of retaining a lawyer, a bludgeon against which students have little defense. This power discrepancy demands discretion on the part of the university. There is a level of injustice in the act of a university wielding this power against a student without a grounding in legitimate policy.

Plagiarism laws aren't just about whether you copied from someone else. A lot of times, certainly in all the universities I've been part of, they will penalize you if you did not take reasonable precautions to ensure that others did not copy from you. There's nothing unreasonable about this.

As far as the rest of your comment goes, maybe there are some cases when students are unfairly penalized for hard-to-follow policies. But the instance here seems pretty clear cut. I also think shady behavior from students more often than not goes unpunished, so your fears of a power-drunk university arbitrary destroying students' GPA just for the heck of it, seem unjustified.

It wasn't prohibited - this was 2002, and they were only just getting up to speed with this internet thing. It wasn't exactly work that could have easily been plagiarised - 20,000 word research paper on Minkowski, Kaluza-Klein, etc.

I had no revenge, I just ended up with a worse than hoped for degree, a deeper distrust of authority, and utter contempt for university "education", which would be better described as "conformation".

Do you really think that what you did was acceptable? It's equivalent to putting up your essay on a public notice board. Do you think the latter would've been acceptable behavior?

Maybe the punishment was a little harsh, but I think it'd be hard to argue you weren't in the wrong.

> a deeper distrust of authority, and utter contempt for university "education", which would be better described as "conformation"

Based on what you've said so far, to me you sound immature and are rationalizing your immaturity by blaming "the system."

I think it was perfectly acceptable, yes. I wrote a paper on a topic of my choice, I handed it in, and I then posted it to my site, as a blog post.

There was nothing that prohibited this, and I had posted data (astronomical observations & images) and assignments to my site for years previous to this incident.

Frankly, I would suggest that your thinking is extremely immature, if your first course of action is to call someone else immature, and to respect all authority unquestioningly - shows a lack of development of thought, and an absence of critical thinking.

> madaxe_again said that the University gave him a zero for plagiarizing a website when he was the one that controlled that website.

Many university "plagiarism" policies prohibit all of (And this has been true since before the web was a thing): (1) plagiarizing others by copying their work, (2) "plagiarizing" yourself by turning in work of your own that is not original work exclusively for the course it is prepared for without explicit advance permission to reuse previous work (or use one piece of work for two simultaneous classes), or (3) facilitating plagiarism by other by way of publishing work done for class assignments without explicit advance permission.

> Tanking a students GPA is a pretty tremendous bludgeon, and outside of retaining a lawyer, a bludgeon against which students have little defense.

Most universities have procedures to resolve student complaints about irregularities in grading, application of policies, etc., short of requiring a lawsuit against the university, which do not generally require legal counsel to make use of.

In 2002 at Durham (UK), it wasn't prohibited at all. They'd only just started using anti-plagiarism software. It also wasn't really a very plagarisable piece of work - big research paper on supersymmetry.

Finally, the publication date on my website was several days after I handed it in - so I assume you, like they, believe I have a secret time machine?

At the same time though, what's the institution going to do? Teachers are already underpaid as it is, and you want them to manually check results from the websites their anti-plagiarism software finds to identify the owner and check if it's the student that submitted the work? Good luck with that, also given that websites are often not tied to single identifiable persons.

Professors at universities are not typically in the same financial boat as teachers at public K-12 schools. They usually earn in the range of 70k-80k (at least they did when I went to school 5+ years ago).

Also, they usually have undergrads who will do free manual labor for them.

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.

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.

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).

> 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.

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.

> 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/polic...

As I posted above to your other comment, the Honor Code does in fact warn against publicizing your work:

As described in the Student Code, aiding someone else's cheating also constitutes cheating. Leaving your program in plain sight or leaving a computer without logging out, thereby leaving your programs open to copying, may constitute cheating depending upon the circumstances. Consequently, you should always take care to prevent others from copying your programs, as it certainly leaves you open to accusations of cheating. If somebody else hands in code identical to yours, you may be penalized!

Laws (and I'm considering honor code policies to fall in that category) are not programs. They intentionally have some ambiguity so that humans can interpret the meaning. Here, the intent is clearly that students should not share their work. They need not explicitly forbid all forms that such sharing could take.

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.

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.

That's a problem, but not a DMCA problem.

>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?

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.

here there is a repo, public accesible -- although I can't be sure they are related

https://github.com/BtXin/cs241_mps

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?

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