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.

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.

I'm a student in CS@Illinois and I took this class last semester. For assignment one, they gave us a library and the following where we had to make a working shell (sorry for formatting):

/ @file shell.c / #include <stdio.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/wait.h> #include <unistd.h> #include "log.h"

  log_t Log;

  /**
   *  * Starting point for shell.
   *   */
  int main(int argc, char ** argv) {
      /**
   *       * Analyze command line arguments
   *             */
      while(1)
      {
  	/**
   * 	 * Print a command prompt
   * 	 	 */
  	
  	
  	/**
   * 	 * Read the commands
   * 	 	 */
  	
  	
  	/**
   * 	 * Print the PID of the process executing the command
   * 	 	 */
  	
  	
  	/**
   * 	 * Decide which actions to take based on the command (exit, run program, etc.)
   * 	 	 */
      }
      return 0;
  }

The provided code is rather sparse (by design), but the University holds copyright on it.

You can use four leading spaces at the start of each line for a code block.

What you've posted doesn't look substantial enough to be copyrightable to me; the idea of writing a main containing a while loop is certainly not original to the university, and the comments would presumably not be present in this repo since they'd've been replaced by working code. I sure hope the university of Illinois doesn't own the copyright on any shell I write from now on, because that would be ridiculous.