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Comment by kwertzzz | Hacker News Reader

This list of DMCA take-down at [1] is really extremely long and there are several universities that ask for instance to remove the solution of students' assignments [2]. I am wondering if a university can really claim copyright to a solution made by students and if a breach of "Georgia Tech Honor Code" (for example) is really a copyright issue. From [2] it does not seem that the assignment itself is copied to the repository. Should it be GitHub's responsibility that the students comply with their honor code?

[1] https://github.com/github/dmca [2] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2022/03/2022-03-1...

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I'm fairly sure that there's some T's and C's these days when you go to a university, just to cover this legally. And they cover it legally to prevent cheating and copying answers, because that would seriously reduce the worth of a degree from that university.

A student breaching terms of a contract would still not constitute a copyright violation, which is the only thing DMCA can be used for (legally).

A student publishing code derived from starter code / skeleton developed by course faculty is indeed a copyright violation.

If that were so then I would agree (although, depending on how much code is in the skeleton, it might not contain enough creativity to reach the threshold for copyrightability). But didn't sound like what's happening in this particular case (the wording is a bit ambiguous ... maybe deliberately?):

> I am part of the Georgia Tech [private], and I have found code solutions for a class at Georgia Tech. Whenever student turn into their code assignments they agree to the Georgia Tech Honor Code stating they are not cheating or allowing others to cheat by sharing Georgia Tech’s assessment materials. The assignment materials were provided to students so that they could complete their tasks and isn't to be shared with others.

I would agree that if the course faculty provide significant and non-trival starter code, then publishing the solution would be a copyright violation.

Some DMCA claims do indeed mention "The repository [from the student] contains code provided to complete assignments [georgia tech]" ([1]). But the claim at [2] does not mention this. It only says "This repository contains Georgia Tech class assignment solutions." under the section "Please provide a detailed description of the original copyrighted work".

[1] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2022/04/2022-04-0...

[2] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2022/03/2022-03-1...

If the solutions have been copied from a set of solutions published by the university, they will have copyright. If the solutions are the students own work, then they won't, and this is abuse of the DMCA.

For the sake of a mind game assume that assignments and solutions can be copyrighted.

The mind game is: The assignment is most likely produced with a solution, but published without (lets say else it would not be 'assignable'). For deterministic solutions, could you copyright it without publication?

In other words, can a connect the dots or color by number drawing book claim copyright on the solved version?

It depends on the contract - don't some universities have an IP clause (like many companies) where all work/research you perform there becomes the property of the university? They then give you limited rights to use this content for personal study, etc. This means that all work performed by the student for the purpose of the assignment is then under the university's copyright.

I suppose they could take this a step further by making students sign a confidentiality agreement for assignment solutions, which is legally stronger than a honor code agreement. I won't be surprised if this becomes a thing in the future.

My general sense is that the reason the hiring process at tech companies is so reliant on the kind of technical interview questions that HackerRank makes its money off of is largely due to the fact that students can indeed get solutions online to the various problems they're assigned, and thus many computer science degrees are due more to the student's abilities with Google and/or their reliance on private tutors/services to generate solutions.

Some teachers might check for plagiarism but it's not hard to make enough changes to any body of code to make something like a diff test in an automated submission pass. Automated solution testing seems to be the norm in computer science courses as well, so it has become relatively easy for students to pass courses with good grades using this approach. There are some ways to avoid some of this, for example having in-class tests where students have to write code out with pencil and paper under a time limit while being observed, but that's only part of the grade usually.

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