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From: warren@eecs.cs.pdx.edu (Warren Harrison)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Software Theft and Protection
Message-ID: <2936@psueea.UUCP>
Date: 31 May 90 16:36:02 GMT
References: <1990May31.051526.17185@groucho>
Sender: news@psueea.UUCP
Reply-To: warren@eecs.UUCP (Warren Harrison)
Organization: Portland State University, Portland, OR
Lines: 26

In article <1990May31.051526.17185@groucho> moreaux@groucho.UUCP () writes:
>
>As part of my graduate work I am planning to 
>devise some method of establishing ownership of code through 
>the use of style, metrics, complexity, embedded code, etc as a
>fingerprinting type of technique. If such a beast can be devised,
>it will provide a springboard to legally defining code ownership.

Software Science has been used for a first pass at plaguerism
detection for years now. Karl Ottenstein did some work on this
when he was at Purdue. I have heard of several schools that
also do this. The last I heard, Karl was at Los Alamos Labs.

In the Fall, a special issue of the Journal of SYstems and
Software will include a paper about a plagiarism detection
system. The author is Geoff Whale from a university in
Australia (anyone have his e-mail address?). If you're
really interested I'll see if I can dig up an address for
him.

Warren

==========================================================================
Warren Harrison                                          warren@cs.pdx.edu
Department of Computer Science                                503/725-3108
Portland State University