How do I report a freelancer for plagiarism and coercing?

[3d835793]

My freelancer made me pay her money and give a good feedback before even giving me a code. And she had completely plagiarized the code from github. This is absolutely ridiculous!

[browersr]

You can contact Customer Support and launch a ticket via: https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us

Of course I have no idea what your project is or what code you are talking about; however, Github in the public space tends to have open source software which people are free to take and use as they please. The notion of "plagiarizing" the code as you put it, isn't typically in play with the types of public repositories on Github.

[kat303]

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@Subha D wrote:
My freelancer made me pay her money and give a good feedback before even giving me a code. And she had completely plagiarized the code from github. This is absolutely ridiculous!

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 In the future, freelancers can not Make you pay before work is completed or delivered to you. They also can not force you to leave feedback. Feedback is left only after a contract is closed by a client and payment is made to the freelancer.

As for code from github. As I understand the code available on that site is open code. That means it is available to anyone and anyone can make whatever modifications to it or keep it as it is. Because it's open code it is not plaglarized.

[michael_skaggs]

Actually a lot of it depends on what license the particular repository uses. You can do whatever you want with most code for personal use, but there are often licenses that have restrictions or stipulations on what can be done when adding the code to something you're doing as part of a larger project.

Some licenses only require that you attribute the code and you're free to make whatever changes you want, while others say that you can use the code however you want, but any changes must be accompanied by the full original code, etc.

Most repositories will have a license.txt that says what license format they've chosen (and there are several). There are those that say you're not allowed to use the code for any commercial project, and anything you do with the code has to also be open source. But one thing I think applies to all of them is lifting someone else's code and passing it off as your own is highly unethical. And if that's what the freelancer did, then they really didn't do the work they were asked to.

I don't have all the facts, but on the surface, it looks like this client got scammed. Unfortunately, by paying for the "work" before even seeing if it was what they wanted, they don't really have any leverage as far as Upwork is concerned. But you can be sure they'll be more cautious in the future.

[petra_r]

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Michael S wrote:  they don't really have any leverage as far as Upwork is concerned. But you can be sure they'll be more cautious in the future.

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 Oh but they do (have leverage) if the payment was made less than 30 days ago. In that case (only) they can initiate a dispute via Upwork but the fist step would be to contact the freelancer and discuss it.