This is very lazily researched, a few minutes in google will give you pretty clear confirmation that he did in fact use several contracted ghostwriters. This was brought up by Scholastic publishing as evidence of breach of contract when they sued Parachute Press back in 1999. See this link for the court filings [0], note here that RL's representatives do not deny the claim that the ghostwriters were employed by RL but instead that the use of them did not suffice to constitute breach of contract.
So he has essentially via his legal representation confirmed that to varying degrees he did not in fact write many of the books past the first 20. Instead, this filing shows that he often wrote outlines which he then passed onto other contractors. Scholastic claims here that they lost substantial amounts of revenue because the ghostwriters did not write stories as well as RL.
My understanding is it is an arxiv-style repository but with absolutely zero censorship or curation for the most part. In practice, that means it ends up being a stable repository for actual researchers to host their research preprints easily, and an army of crackpot paper uploads that are very entertaining to read.
You are probably thinking of the show First 48. I was thinking of this exact show when reading the comments here about how Columbo plots rely too heavily on the murderer trying to help out Columbo with his investigation in order to seem innocent. It may seem unrealistic or stupid of them to do so, but if you watch shows like First 48 which follow homicide detectives around and show these interrogations, it happens A TON. More than I expected to be sure. I don't think Columbo is unrealistic in that respect.
I certainly don't, I view everything I've ever written as MIT-equivalent. Feel free to copypaste what I've written without my express permission or rewrite it as you see fit. Does not matter to me whether this is to create spammy blogposts, commercial ventures, or for your school essay.
I'm very curious if this is somehow related to the ongoing gitlab outage also being reported on the front page. This just impacted me directly while I was going over a homework problem set with a student.
There are some great pieces written on this. The author is just in an academic bubble. If you go to a riotous situation on the ground you will encounter people spreading and handing out plenty of free literature espousing the views the rioters hold about their activities. It is a common topic of discussion and formalization, just not in an academic context generally. One example I saw that was particularly interesting is [0].
So he has essentially via his legal representation confirmed that to varying degrees he did not in fact write many of the books past the first 20. Instead, this filing shows that he often wrote outlines which he then passed onto other contractors. Scholastic claims here that they lost substantial amounts of revenue because the ghostwriters did not write stories as well as RL.
[0] https://decisions.courts.state.ny.us/NYSComDiv/Oct02/600512-...