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.<p>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.
Seems to me that a university's computer science department should have a better way to deal with plagiarism than this.<p>From <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8806910" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8806910</a> there's a link to <a href="http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/" rel="nofollow">http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/</a><p>and I quote:
'''
How to cheat in this class<p>I've caught so many attempts at cheating in my courses that I feel the need to provide a guide to students.<p>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.
'''
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.)
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.
Is anybody aware of the reasoning behind the redacted links? It looks like only one past DMCA in this repo has received similar treatment:<p><a href="https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/4e465059012c946abd3f2fa2cc1633cdd20fe2cc/2014-10-08-CS225.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/4e465059012c946abd3f2fa2...</a><p>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.
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 .. <a href="https://github.com/mukichou/cs241-2" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mukichou/cs241-2</a>
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: <a href="http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/" rel="nofollow">http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/</a> which is honestly the "best" solution to this particular issue.
Kind of amazing this is against the universities own stance on copyright ownership:<p>"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.)"<p><a href="http://otm.illinois.edu/studentownership" rel="nofollow">http://otm.illinois.edu/studentownership</a>
As this is an issue of copyright violation, I don't have any issue with this. A DMCA complaint fixes just this.<p>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.
I can speak to this since I actually took this class last semester (Fall 2014).<p>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.<p>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.<p>As far as I'm aware, the course staff has indeed contacted individual repo owners on Github for take down.
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.<p>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.
Sharing of previous semester code (or quizzes, exams, etc) should <i>enhance</i> the learning process, not hinder it.<p>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.<p>When I was in school 15+ years ago, we had officially sanctioned ways of sharing materials from previous semesters of coursework. Is that uncommon?
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.<p>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.<p>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...).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
The DMCA is only to get the repos down.<p>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.<p>Really if the class they're in provided a git repo they wouldn't have this issue.
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.
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.
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?<p>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?