Author finds pirated version of his book in a Google Code Project, files bug. | Hacker News Reader

Author finds pirated version of his book in a Google Code Project, files bug.

code.google.com

93 pointssross18 comments

It looks like the bug was reported by someone named "Alan", yet it doesn't look like any of the authors of those books have that name. So possibly just disgruntled third party pointing out the piracy.

62 up-votes on this link so far, #1 on HN, and it's not even true. A good title goes a long way.

Would have been even more popular if it read 'her book.'

And included a link to a very colorful but incomprehensible resume.

.. in only 300 lines.

Or maybe people upvote it because of the content, not because of who made it ? If it turns out it's one of the publishers (or even a fan) instead of the author, this bug report will still be just as awesome.

Maybe. But I'm pretty sure it was upvoted because of the sensationalist title.

It has Google in the title, instant upvote for any article with Google, Quora or Stackoverflow.

Why is it not true; the bug reporter never claims to be the author, just notes that the book isn't owned by the repo owner (those names don't match) and that the ebook is most likely pirated. If it is not pirated, and wright.edu has access to the Thomson course technology materials, then distributing/making available publicly is certainly a violation of the epub license agreement.

The headline is a pretty clear statement that the author reported the bug; "Author finds pirated version of his book in a Google Code Project, files bug" can't really be read to mean anything else than that the author filed the bug. Coderdude was referring to the headline, not the content of the article.

This isn't even a real project -- more likely someone using Google Code as his personal SVN repository.

The Google Code PDF link is about the 7th search result, so that's likely how this was found:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&channel=cs&...

Looks like a school project with associated reading material. The owner forgot or overlooked the fact that the repo is public and indexable.

If you notice, the one that uploaded the files is a .edu account...

Quick takedown by Google. Lucky for the student, as he was easily identifiable through his .edu email address on the project.

At my university I haven't seen anything this egregious, but students will use Google Code or GitHub for course projects, ignoring that they are public. I used BitBucket's free private hosting for a recent project, and GitHub is great about supporting students if they just ask.

> GitHub is great about supporting students if they just ask.

I've read that they give out private repositories for school projects, but they haven't replied to a request I've opened 2 or 3 days ago. I got a paid account because I needed the repository today.

Looks like the repo has been taken down now

Yeah, project was taken down for violating our ToS. Issue was pretty entertaining though, we got a chuckle out of it here too.

My guess is the person will ignore the bug report.

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