Week 8: Code as forgery — plagiarism, licence-laundering, and a git history that lies

What forging a painting has in common with faking a commit history or laundering a licence, and where the analogy stops holding.

14 September 2027

Software has its own forms of forgery, and they behave surprisingly like the material ones: plagiarised code with the identifying comments stripped is a copy with the note removed, exactly like an unsigned canvas passed off as a master’s; a rebased commit history with the real authorship rewritten out is provenance fabrication with a different tool; a permissive licence quietly swapped for a project’s real, more restrictive one is a forged chain of ownership. What doesn’t carry over is the detection method — you can’t run a mass spectrometer on a git log, but you can diff it, and the tools that catch software forgery (blame, provenance attestation, dependency graphs) are the digital descendants of the same underlying instinct: check the parts of the object a forger has no reason to have thought about.

Outline#

• plagiarism as forgery: what the “note” is in a codebase
• rewritten history and licence-laundering as provenance fraud
• where the paint/code analogy breaks: chemistry doesn’t scale, diffing does
• Assignment 3, “The Tell,” starts from here — see the assessment page