Can You Copyright Homework Titles?
from the that-may-be-difficult dept
Earlier this summer, we wrote about how SJSU computer science student (and Techdirt reader), Kyle Brady, had won a fight with one of his professors, over Kyle's decision to post the code he had written for the class online. He had only done so after the assignments were due (so as not to reveal the answers to other students), and did so to show off his coding skills and to help him get a job. Yet, the professor threatened him, claiming he was "cheating" and that he would get a failing grade. After taking the issue up the administrative chain, Brady was told that he had done nothing wrong and had not violated any academic policy.At the end of the post, I noted that I was a bit surprised that a separate issue hadn't come up. The entire discussion had been about school policy, and not about copyright. Yet, many schools these days now try to claim the copyright on code written by students. Perhaps I spoke too soon.
Kyle alerts us that, with the new school year beginning, the same professor has added a new copyright policy to his assignments. Thankfully, it doesn't sound like he's claiming copyright over the code, but over the assignments themselves. You can see the policy for yourself, where it states:
The homework assignments in this class are copyrighted by Dr. Beeson, including the names of the assignments, and the names of all the required classes and methods, all the examples that are posted with the assignment, and the problem descriptions and programming hints that are posted. Your solutions are your own, but if you want to post them publicly, you must change the names of the classes and methods, and you cannot post the problem descriptions. This should enable you to show your work to a prospective employer, and possibly allow me to re-use the assignments without future students being able to Google your solutions.Now, to give Dr. Beeson credit, he appears to be trying to come up with a reasonable compromise here, allowing Kyle to do the sorts of things he wanted to do, without making it so that he would have to come up with new assignments every semester. So, I can respect that. But, I'm not sure that he's got a legal right for all of that. It's not entirely clear if the names of the assignments are enough "creative expression" to warrant a copyright. Ditto for the names of required classes and methods. Even if they were, I would imagine any student would have a pretty strong fair use argument in reposting them.
I think it's fair for Dr. Beeson to request students not post info that makes it so easy for future students to Google the answers from former students (though, let's face it, students will always find ways to get similar info anyway), but claiming it's due to copyright seems like a stretch.
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The new threat is students posting their assignments on sites like getacoder and putting them out to tender.
Unfortunately academic misconduct is getting more and more difficult to prove and we have no sanction against those outside the institution who assist with it.
Copyright law provides a powerful (if blunt) implement that can be used to deter these activities - we were thinking of going for statutory damages (might be able to retire then...)
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So what if they do that? It is their work after all.
"Unfortunately academic misconduct is getting more and more difficult to prove and we have no sanction against those outside the institution who assist with it."
Let me get this: do you call a student (potentially) getting some money out of work they have done by themselves academic misconduct? Why not ask for their first-born too? Don't even get me started on the "no sanction against those outside the institution who assist with it" part, which I find nauseating. This is one type of behavior that I notice to be recurring all the time when it comes to education institutions (schools/colleges/universities etc.): many, if not most, of them treat their students as slaves that have to be taught their place, instead of as current, and potentially future, partners. The result is that you get a large mass of teachers/professors being a really bitter bunch which are almost never able to work as anything else than glorified prison guards... and I find this state of affairs really sad and troubling.
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NO I meant students putting our assignment specifications onto getacoder and paying someone else to do the work for them. I hope you'll agree that's rather a different propostion.
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The moral of the story, a teacher who actively participates in class will know when their students don't deserve to pass.
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Yes - we do know that - the problem is to get that information into the "official system" in a robust way that the student can't challenge through an appeal.
Our current approach is to run a programming test under exam conditions (we call it the driving test). That gives us really reliable information about what students are capable of.
We find that the good students are proud of their abilities and don't want to cheat.
Recently I issued a warning to one of my groups about the ways we could detect if they were cheating. One of the best students then said "you're telling us how to cheat without getting caught" I said "I'm telling students like you how to cheat without getting caught - but I know you wouldn't do it anyway. The ones that would cheat don't understand what I'm saying well enough to work that out - so to them it just sounds like a warning"
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It's quite easy to detect but very difficult to prove.
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I thought the point of homework is for the student to learn what's being taught through application.
To test if the students actually learned the information, you use 'tests'. If the student passes the test (without cheating obviously), then I don't suppose it really matter much if the student did the homework, farmed it out, or didn't do it at all.
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It's like saying that it's OK for an athlete to use drugs provided he pays for them.
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incentive
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Re: incentive
The (any good) professor puts a considerable amount of effort into creating original, engaging exercises that captures the intended learning outcomes for the assignment... that's a non-trivial task; one that requires time for which many professors (of the adjunct/part-time variety) are not compensated.
Assignments, lectures, etc. are the professor's performance, as much as a musical performance or a play. That being said, I think Michael is probably dead on that the title of the assignment, per se, is not sufficient for protection, but that the work as a whole (the assignment, plus the suggested method names, plus sample data) is.
Not to draw the wrath of the Dr. Beeson, but... I'm fairly certain that if a student wanted to write a critique of the assignment, then excerpts from the assignment could be used under fair use doctrine. (I am not a lawyer)
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Re: Re: incentive
A student's assignment based on some "starting code" supplied by the professor (as I believe to be the case here) is clearly a derivative work - so the professor is within his rights in putting any conditions he likes on it.
Now this is a misuse of a bad law but it is to a reasonable purpose (preventing students from cheating).
Personally I would rather do without copyright law - but seeing as it exists I 'm not above using it in such a way.
btw - not sure if this is also true in the US but in the UK there is an almost complete exemption from copyright law in the setting answering and marking of examination questions - I'm not sure if this extends to assignments but it might be ironic that the porfessor could ignore copyright when setting his questions and then impose it on his students...
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Re: incentive
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you cannot copyright a title
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Loser
Anything that can be copied will be, just accept it and move on.
It's not like the guy is writing the Lord of the Rings here, is it?
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Copyright in music
Thanks
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Odd
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Pig Latin? ROT13?
Is it a derivative work? Protected by law? Still not allowed?
Seems you only need to get one step beyond copyright to be safe, and you can standardize how that step is made.
Could also give professors an alias, perhaps based on their ID in the schools system (normally visible during registration periods).
Seems like there are still ways.
IMHO a professor working for a state college shouldn't be able to personally claim copyright while being paid largely by tax dollars. Even private, it should be the copyright of the school, not the individual.
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"Google the answers"
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Isn't this a disincentive to create new works
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Re: Isn't this a disincentive to create new works
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Can You Copyright Homework Titles?
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(Well, that and he clearly doesn't understand copyright since he tries to claim copyright over **titles**, which are not copyrightable. His attempts to use copyright as a censorship tool are somewhat ignorant and reprehensible.)
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I understand the professor
So I guess what I am saying is I see this as a non-issue. For real cheating it will probably be pretty obvious and for everything else, even what is missed, it will likely catch up with the student anyway. Some day he'll be presented with something where no google search will work and if he unprepared let him suffer.
I have also learned a lot by looking at other people's code. There was an extra credit assignment in my last class where the teacher specifically said you could look at sample code online, but that your code must include certain things. That assignment I ended up using someone else's code, but revamped it to the way I typically do things. That processes actually taught me a lot.
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Double-standard?
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It is actually very common.
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Wrong Method of Teaching.
Graded homework is not a terribly good idea in teaching this kind of material, at least to ordinary students. You want to develop the ability to solve a problem within fifteen minutes of encountering it-- it's like teaching a foreign language. There's just no way you can fairly administer that as homework. Some people live further from campus than others, some have after-school jobs, etc. That means, practically speaking, that the assignment has to be done in class, or possibly in a teaching lab. When I was in engineering school, back in the early 1980's, a common practice in the mature applied-physics types of engineering subjects, eg. Strengths of Materials, was that people would reserve the last five minutes of a class period for a mini-quiz, consisting of one problem, mimeographed on a half-sheet of paper, with space on the page to work out the solution. In computer programming, it was not feasible to set actual programming assignments on very short notice like that, because computers were still scarce and expensive. This was just before computers became ubiquitous. However, it didn't much matter because those of us studying computer programming in one form or another were all computer-drunk, and no external discipline was required. What happened was that we young men waited around in the computer center at night, hanging out and talking shop, until, some time after midnight, one of the limited number of keypunches or computer terminals became available, and then we nipped in and used it. The computer center was a windowless basement, not very well lighted. No one would have been overly surprised if a werewolf or a vampire had walked in. The one regular Computer Science sequence I took, as distinct from engineering programming courses, was an Algorithms and Data Structures course which was labeled PL/I. At the time, PL/I was the mainframe equivalent of C, and one did the same kinds of things in it, the kind of programming which involved memory allocation and pointers. As a student from a branch of mechanical engineering, I had to pull strings and bend rules to get into this course. At any rate, we were writing comparatively large quantities of code with pencils on paper during quizzes and hourly exams, because it simply was not economically feasible to assign weekly assignments which involved using the computer. The actual programming assignments, necessary for us to learn debugging, were firmly tied to big concepts, such as B-trees and semaphores.
The problem is that Computer Science has become something for people who are not drunk on computers, but whose career counselors told them to take Computer Science. Kids nowadays have grown up with computers from their earliest infancy. If you are drunk on computers, you are apt to learn this kind of thing at the age of fourteen or fifteen. Looking at Kyle Brady's website descriptions of his coursework, I notice that a lot of the problems seem to be exercises in getting the student to rapidly translate things from one formal language to another formal language, in order to build basic proficiency. If you are teaching a foreign language, it is understood that you have to work out a system of exemptions, so that people who already speak idiomatic French do not wind up in Freshman French. Apart from the AP exams, every French department has an internal placement exam, which may not be as statistically validated as the Princeton product, but which does not cost fifty or a hundred dollars per test either. However, the necessary structure of placement exams does not seem to exist for sophomore-level Computer Science courses.
The teaching of foreign languages is of course primarily oral, so cribbing isn't too much of an issue. If foreign language teachers graded primarily on typed translation homework assignments, Babelfish would be a very formidable cribsheet, but of course they don't grade that way. They conjugate sentences around the room. Programming courses at the level of Algorithms and Data Structures, for those who need to take them, probably need to be taught in a classroom which has rows of tables, with built-in computers at each seat, where the teacher can set a problem, cause it to appear on everyone's screen, and walk around looking over students' shoulders and observing where they are having problems.
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No, I won't think of it as work for hire. The analogy fails miserably given that the student is not an employee--the only category that qualifies as work for hire--and it is the student paying the university, not the other way around. A grade is not a payment in any way, shape or form, nor is a diploma.
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Thanks
I'll have an update in a few weeks after I keep going after this issue.
--Kyle
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This one might hold up...
Basically the idea is that the copyright can't simply be on the title alone, but the title is naturally included insomuch as it is connected to the rest of the work.
I'm impressed with this guy's approach and willingness to reason and I think it demonstrates practical good sense, the likes of which isn't normally featured on this blog. It's not going to stop cheating outright, but the preventative measure seems appropriate to the situation.
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What?
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To make such a requirement would exceed his authority to set university policy as a mere employee or contractor.
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When will it end?
I can seriously imagine the day when people will have to get permission (or else) to as much THINK about something copyrighted.
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Today I am the president of a large, multi-national corporation, getting billions from the government, and I laugh all the way to the bank.
All I can say is pay your taxes on time sheeple!
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Fair Use
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Does any of this really matter?
There were numerous times when I have copied homework or simply found shortcuts/solutions online to solve problems. But if I can do that and still produce my own work and/or succeed on an exam without outside help, I don't really see a problem here.
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