University of Illinois issues DMCA takedown for previous years' homework

https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/313ac74e3de8b692adfed5ef2bf60436aa8e2040

by ecaron • 11 years ago

73 95 11 years ago

comboy2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

spacemanmatt3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

mdasen• 11 years 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.

comboy2• 11 years ago

OK, yes that makes more sense.

I guess students should then learn to only upload parts coded by them? ;)

dalke2• 11 years 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: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_3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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_again7• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

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

voidlogic• 11 years 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?

akerl_7• 11 years 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.

LLWM2• 11 years 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.

LukeShu• 11 years 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://otm.illinois.edu/studentownership

Alupis4• 11 years 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/polic...

chrismcb• 11 years ago

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.

yock• 11 years 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.

wsxcde5• 11 years 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.

Cthulhu_3• 11 years ago

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.

clock863• 11 years 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_again7• 11 years 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.

spiritplumber4• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

teacup50• 11 years 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?

Alupis4• 11 years 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.

wsxcde5• 11 years 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.

punkcoder• 11 years 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?

clock863• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Would a diff/patch be DMCA-proof then? Or would it fall under derivative works?

akerl_7• 11 years 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/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• 11 years 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_3• 11 years 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.

aet2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

rhino3692• 11 years ago

Tweaking your assignments but keeping the main thrust is more efficient and probably provides better experiences. The bugs get worked out, the professors and instructors have worked through it.

The real issue is that students keep this stuff and pass it down year to year.

I remember taking ECE 451 at Illinois and someone had taken photographs of the solutions that were posted on the wall for students to look it.

aet2• 11 years ago

There are way to identify weak students even when they google all the answers. Base your grades on assignments, tests, projects, presentations, pop quiz, etc.. you will see the pattern.

belorn• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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

Ledyard• 11 years 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.

calibwam2• 11 years 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.

lmm3• 11 years 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.

calibwam2• 11 years 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.

moosey• 11 years 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.

spacemanmatt3• 11 years ago

Or even Google, for that matter. Remember libraries?

ianamartin2• 11 years 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 there's a link to 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

spacemanmatt3• 11 years 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.

nickofbh2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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/ which is honestly the "best" solution to this particular issue.

nadams• 11 years 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.

Aradalf2• 11 years ago

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

lettergram• 11 years 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

University of Illinois issues DMCA takedown for previous years' homework

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