As far as the rest of your comment goes, maybe there are some cases when students are unfairly penalized for hard-to-follow policies. But the instance here seems pretty clear cut. I also think shady behavior from students more often than not goes unpunished, so your fears of a power-drunk university arbitrary destroying students' GPA just for the heck of it, seem unjustified.
Many university "plagiarism" policies prohibit all of (And this has been true since before the web was a thing): (1) plagiarizing others by copying their work, (2) "plagiarizing" yourself by turning in work of your own that is not original work exclusively for the course it is prepared for without explicit advance permission to reuse previous work (or use one piece of work for two simultaneous classes), or (3) facilitating plagiarism by other by way of publishing work done for class assignments without explicit advance permission.
> Tanking a students GPA is a pretty tremendous bludgeon, and outside of retaining a lawyer, a bludgeon against which students have little defense.
Most universities have procedures to resolve student complaints about irregularities in grading, application of policies, etc., short of requiring a lawsuit against the university, which do not generally require legal counsel to make use of.
I had no revenge, I just ended up with a worse than hoped for degree, a deeper distrust of authority, and utter contempt for university "education", which would be better described as "conformation".
Maybe the punishment was a little harsh, but I think it'd be hard to argue you weren't in the wrong.
> a deeper distrust of authority, and utter contempt for university "education", which would be better described as "conformation"
Based on what you've said so far, to me you sound immature and are rationalizing your immaturity by blaming "the system."
There was nothing that prohibited this, and I had posted data (astronomical observations & images) and assignments to my site for years previous to this incident.
Frankly, I would suggest that your thinking is extremely immature, if your first course of action is to call someone else immature, and to respect all authority unquestioningly - shows a lack of development of thought, and an absence of critical thinking.
In my opinion, arbitrarily shoehorning a perceived infraction into a preexisting rule that it doesn't fit so that you can punish behavior that you hadn't thought to disallow before the fact is an abuse of university policies.
If madaxe is recounting the event accurately, then I think that the university is more in the wrong. University policies are hard enough to follow in situations like this when the university sticks to the letter of the policy. Plus, universities can always go back to update policies as they see new behaviors that they would like to disallow. But if the university uses whatever policies that they do have on the books to punish arbitrary behaviors that they don't disallow, then it puts the student in the situation of having to predict how this practice will impact them in the future. This is essentially impossible, and quite defeats the entire purpose of having policies written down in the first place. If this practice is common, then the policies are merely legitimacy theater, and are in fact illegitimate.
The situation is further confounded by the power dynamics at play. Tanking a students GPA is a pretty tremendous bludgeon, and outside of retaining a lawyer, a bludgeon against which students have little defense. This power discrepancy demands discretion on the part of the university. There is a level of injustice in the act of a university wielding this power against a student without a grounding in legitimate policy.