RAI Foundation theft — evidence

This page presents proof that Rai Foundation has been systematically stealing resources from various internet sources and misrepresenting those resources as its own for the purposes of attracting students to its campuses for financial gain. See an introduction to this theft by Rai Foundation. In that introduction it is noted that I have issued Rai Foundation with "cease & desist" notices via my U.S. attorneys to stop this theft of my material, but no response has been received to date, and the stolen materials are currently (May 6, 2007) still available on Rai Foundation's web site.

The "Lecture Notes" to the "Fundamental (sic - a "college" that cannot tell the difference between "Fundamental" and "Fundamentals"!) of Computer Programming" course are hosted by the Rai Foundation at http://www.rcw.raifoundation.org/course-comp-btech-cs-notes-funda-cp.htm.

To ensure the integrity of this proof, I have downloaded copies of all the relevant "lecture notes" from http://www.rcw.raifoundation.org/course-comp-btech-cs-notes-funda-cp.htm and hosted them here for posterity. If the Rai Foundation objects to this mirroring of the "lecture notes" for their courses, I invite them to reflect that I am both the author and the copyright owner of these "lecture notes" and I can therefore publish and republish them wherever and whenever I want.

Notice that the properties of the PDF documents incorrectly and dishonestly identify the author as "SK" when I am the real author.

Also notice the note at the bottom of their index page:

All individuals like faculty, students and self learners can use the content. All institutions should contact Rai Foundation Colleges before using any of our course content.

Quite how Rai Foundation thinks it has the authority to permit anybody to use my content is a mystery. The fact that they believe that all institutions have to contact Rai Foundation Colleges before using any of my content is similarly mysterious. What is not mysterious is that Rai Foundation is dishonestly and illegally claiming to be the author of this content, when in fact I am the author of it.

Overall, the nine sets of lecture notes listed below have stolen 44 pages from the C programming section of paulgriffiths.net without modification (except for the removal of certain copyright notices, as explained below), in their entirety, and without permission. At the time of writing, there are 61 content pages in this section. Rai Foundation has therefore stolen 72% of the content of this section, by page number. The only sections that they haven't stolen are the Berkeley Sockets examples and the Win32 examples — one wonders whether these sections were too complex for the "professors" of their "Fundamental (sic) of Computer Programming" course to understand.

35 "lessons" in total are listed for that course. The material stolen wholesale from my website comprises the final nine — and therefore the nine most "advanced" — "lessons" for that course. Thus, the most advanced 25% of their course is stolen wholesale from my web site. Clearly they are using my content for this advanced part of the course because they are incapable of writing it themselves, and to give the impression that they are programming "experts" when in fact they clearly are not. Thus, they are misrepresenting themselves as knowledgable academics, when in fact they have to steal code from my web site for their own course notes.

It must be pointed out that the above paragraph may give the impression that Rai Foundation wrote 26 of the 35 lessons, and stole the remaining nine from me. This is not the case — substantially all of the other lessons have been stolen from other individuals. See the other lessons section below for some examples.

I have not investigated any Rai Foundation courses other than "Fundamental (sic) of Computer Programming" but it would not surprise me to find identical results with all the others.

To add insult to injury, the "Rai Open Course Ware" page at http://www.rocw.raifoundation.org/ contains the following astounding message:

Educational institutions who wish to use it for their students can also do so by only providing an acknowledgement to Rai Foundation Colleges as "Source".

This is incontrovertible proof that Rai Foundation has an direct agenda to steal content from across the internet and to explicitly and fraudulently misrepresent that Rai Foundation is the source of this content. This appears to be a global fraud of unprecendented scale for the sole purpose of attracting student revenue as a result of Rai Foundation's criminal theft of intellectual property rights.

The following examples demonstrate the true extent of the fraud perpetuated by Rai Foundation.

"Lesson 26"

Links to the "lesson":

This "lesson" contains eight pages from paulgriffiths.net stolen in their entirety, without modification (except for the removal of certain copyright notices, as explained below), and without permission:

Notice the copyright notices clearly shown both on my pages, and in the stolen source code. Also notice that the copyright notices on the non-source code pages have been dishonestly removed by Rai Foundation.

"Lesson 27"

Links to the "lesson":

This "lesson" contains six pages from paulgriffiths.net stolen in their entirety, without modification (except for the removal of certain copyright notices, as explained below), and without permission:

Notice the copyright notices clearly shown both on my pages, and in the stolen source code. Also notice that the copyright notices on the non-source code pages have been dishonestly removed by Rai Foundation.

"Lesson 28"

Links to the "lesson":

This "lesson" contains two pages from paulgriffiths.net stolen in their entirety, without modification (except for the removal of certain copyright notices, as explained below), and without permission:

Notice the copyright notices clearly shown both on my pages, and in the stolen source code. Also notice that the copyright notices on the non-source code pages have been dishonestly removed by Rai Foundation.

"Lesson 29"

Links to the "lesson":

This "lesson" contains two pages from paulgriffiths.net stolen in their entirety, without modification (except for the removal of certain copyright notices, as explained below), and without permission:

Notice the copyright notices clearly shown both on my pages, and in the stolen source code. Also notice that the copyright notices on the non-source code pages have been dishonestly removed by Rai Foundation.

"Lesson 30"

Links to the "lesson":

This "lesson" contains four pages from paulgriffiths.net stolen in their entirety, without modification (except for the removal of certain copyright notices, as explained below), and without permission:

Notice the copyright notices clearly shown both on my pages, and in the stolen source code. Also notice that the copyright notices on the non-source code pages have been dishonestly removed by Rai Foundation.

"Lesson 31"

"Lesson 31" on Rai Foundation's website links through to "Lesson 30". The introductory notes for "Lesson 30" reference only the foreign language phrase tester example. I imagine that "Lesson 31" was intended to reference the simple calculator example which is in fact included in "Lesson 30".

"Lesson 32"

Links to the "lesson":

This "lesson" contains four pages from paulgriffiths.net stolen in their entirety, without modification (except for the removal of certain copyright notices, as explained below), and without permission:

Notice the copyright notices clearly shown both on my pages, and in the stolen source code. Also notice that the copyright notices on the non-source code pages have been dishonestly removed by Rai Foundation.

"Lesson 33"

Links to the "lesson":

This "lesson" contains four pages from paulgriffiths.net stolen in their entirety, without modification (except for the removal of certain copyright notices, as explained below), and without permission:

Notice the copyright notices clearly shown both on my pages, and in the stolen source code. Also notice that the copyright notices on the non-source code pages have been dishonestly removed by Rai Foundation.

"Lesson 34"

Links to the "lesson":

This "lesson" contains four pages from paulgriffiths.net stolen in their entirety, without modification (except for the removal of certain copyright notices, as explained below), and without permission:

Notice the copyright notices clearly shown both on my pages, and in the stolen source code. Also notice that the copyright notices on the non-source code pages have been dishonestly removed by Rai Foundation.

"Lesson 35"

Links to the "lesson":

This "lesson" contains no less than ten pages from paulgriffiths.net stolen in their entirety, without modification (except for the removal of certain copyright notices, as explained below), and without permission:

Notice the copyright notices clearly shown both on my pages, and in the stolen source code. Also notice that the copyright notices on the non-source code pages have been dishonestly removed by Rai Foundation.

Other Lessons

Rai Foundation has not just stolen from this web site — it has stolen wholesale from many others. This section gives a brief and non-exhaustive list of examples.

The first nine pages of "Lesson 3" (also hosted here for posterity) are stolen directly from Guy Keren's Little Unix Programmers Group web site. The document in question contains the following at the bottom:

permission to copy this document (electronically or on paper, for personal or organization internal use) or publish it on-line is hereby granted, provided that the document is copied as-is, this copyright notice is preserved, and a link to the original document is written in the document's body, or in the page linking to the copy of this document.

Of course, Rai Foundation has not provided the document "as-is" because they have not preserved the copyright notice, they have not linked back to the original document, and there is not a link back to Guy's site on the page linking to the copy of the original document. On the contrary, Rai Foundation has dishonestly claimed to have written it.

Other material in that "lesson" has been stolen from Steve Summit's C Programming Class Notes. Again, Steve's original pages contain a copyright notice which has been removed by Rai Foundation.

Yet more material from that "lesson" has been stolen from Steve Holmes' C Programming course for the University of Strathclyde. There appear to be no copyright notices on the original pages, but Rai Foundation has nevertheless failed to provide an attribution.

Rai Foundation's "Lesson 12" (also hosted here for posterity) contains material stolen from Peter Burden's Programming in C notes, again without attribution, and from Steve Holmes' course referenced above.

All these plagiarisms and frauds can be revealed simply by pasting a section of text from Rai Foundation's course notes into google, and in almost all instances the original sources are revealed. Although I have not checked every word, I believe substantially all of the course notes for the "Fundamental (sic) of Computer Programming" course to be stolen — without attribution — from a variety of other sources. I do not believe that Rai Foundation has created any of it itself. This level of fraud and dishonesty surely has no parallel in the history of supposedly "academic" institutions.