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Rosen, Valenti Warn Colleges About P2P
fini writes "The RIAA and MPAA just sent a letter to 2,300 colleges or so, asking to crack down on P2P. Juicy nugget: 'Not only is piracy of copyrighted works illegal, it can take up a significant percentage of a university's costly bandwidth.' Also mentioned, some quasi-FUD on security issues. Six higher-ed honchos also sent a concurring letter. From the RIAA website, here's the story and the letters (PDF only). Mentioned as examples of model policies: Drake University, UNC Chapel Hill and University of Michigan . Interestingly enough, there is no threatening 'or else' stuff in those letters. Not yet..."
Our tech person actually said that don't care what we do as long as they don't get any letters about us from the RIAA/MPAA attack dogs. So I got the file sharing type stuff running but it is restricted to the college's domain.
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
How long until someone finds a way around the commercial filters software? All it would take it to make p2p traffic look like "legit" (http, ssh, etc) traffic. Packet shapers target by port. So how long until someone figures out a way to use the software to cut right around that?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I tried submitting a story similar to this to /., but I kid you not -- we in the local LUG were threatened with ARREST for protesting when Hillary Rosen personally came to speak to praise us for our policies.
No one was for it after we were told that by one of the CS teachers, and the protest was dissolved.
It was just like when Bush went to Ohio State , except it was for a rich corporate billionaire, not just post 9/11 presidential security!
I'm at Cornell University right now, and interestingly enough, the administration has seemed to be doing the exact opposite, relaxing their guidelines.
The first week, we had take an online class where we learned that if we got caught sharing, we would have community service and stuff.
Then last week, they basically send an e-mail saying that they didn't care if we downloaded stuff, as long as we didn't upload stuff. I'm too lazy to go and check the e-mail, but I believe it gave directions on how to turn off uploads in KaZaA. Weird.
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
In fact it seems as if universities & colleges have been going out of their way to reduce the impact P2P has had on their networks. Bandwidth is money, and at least in the US universities don't have an unlimited supply of cash.
They sent the letter to the wrong people.
null sig
Well if it was a letter they didn't do anything to request I guess it could be.
Is there a definition of spam or a guideline that classifies something as spam?
When my Universities President sends an email it goes to 81,000 students, most the time it's something we don't care about. I guess that could be spam. I always think of it as spam.
College is where people are taught to turn off their minds and subscribe to politically-correct orthodoxy
Outside of college, I haven't found a whole lot of people who think, or really know the details of any orthodoxy. For the first time in my scholastic career, I had a history class that went beyond "We had a revolutionary war in 1776. We had a civil war in 1860. Abraham Lincoln was president. The good guys won both wars." and actually asked you to think about stuff. I've talked to people both on the far right and the far left and everywhere in between. Most people at high school didn't care enough to be right or left, beyond the "Republicans good; Democrats bad!" level. Yes, I've heard stories of political correctness being forced on people at universities, but it's not at every one, and even at those universities, you'll find an amazing diversity of opinion if you actually talk to the students and teachers.
If my university prohibited Napster, as some othes Scandinavian schools did, the collection would probably have never started.
Worse than that, I would never know first-hand what P2P is. This is about academic freedom: you should be allowed to test whatever darn new thing is out there, for whatever reason, otherwise the school lags behind. What you use it for, is your responsibility, of course.
Oh yes, I'm first-hand aware of the associated headaches (cleaning up the lab computers from those pesky money-generating add-ons that pop up an ad at the timing-critical phase of your data acquisition :-).
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
What is P2P? It just means any connected node (called host) on the Internet can connect another one, without one system explicitly meant to be a server only, and the other one a client.
What is so special about that, why all the fuzz? Even the notion of defending P2P makes me sick and is absurd. The Internet is built on (mostly) the TCP protocol, which allows for any node to connect to any other node directly. The Internet *is* P2P and has been so from the beginning.
It is normal to telnet from machine A to machine B, and then telnet back from B to A. It is normal to act both as an ftp client and server, in fact before the web became popular, in the old days, almost any connected node to the Internet acted both as client and as server.
Why is this "evidence" needed? People trying to forbid P2P are trying to forbid Internet, or at least trying to fundamentally change its netowork protocol (which is impossible).
Only ISP's could block incoming connections, thus making "P2P" (how I hate that word, describing something that has been around for ages as if it were something new) impossible. Not many of them do (luckily), only having no fixed IP address makes acting as a server a bit more complicated, but things like dyndns get around that.
One might imagine a future where anyone with a dynamic IP address (hard to trace) is prohibited by the state to have incoming connections. That is a nightmare but I don't think such a draconic law is very probably, and it would be very hard to enforce too.
Deep down, the RIAA knows that it has absolutely no hope of forcing this upon universities, which is why these letters are absent any cease and desist language. They're just going to run it up the flagpole and see who looks.
The final word should be here that it is the job of the Executive Branch of the Federal Government to enforce Federal law. No other entity, whether state or local, has the jurisdiction nor obligation to enforce the CFR. If distributing copyrighted material is a federal crime, then it's the justice deparment, and no one else, who has the power to indict. Civilly, I find it hard to believe that the RIAA would be able to prove that distributing a song cost them any money. What downloader is going to take the stand and testify that he/she would have bought the CD had they not been able to download it? I sure wouldn't. In fact, I would testify that the ability to "try before you buy" has led to my purchasing several CDs that I normally would not have even known about, let alone bought.
Every single Borders bookstore allows you to listen to a CD, in CD quality, and in its entirety, without any inhibitions, before you buy it. Does that not constitute illegal distribution, i.e. allowing someone to listed to copyrighted music without paying? Why isn't Borders being served? How is this different than P2P, save the portability of the music?
If colleges bind together and work with each other, RIAA and MPAA will certainly not be able to shove them around.
Let's see which ones have backbones and which ones do not, this may get interesting.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
I worked for a couple networking depts on campus during my undergraduate "career" at UNC, among which was ResNet. I've learned a _ton_ during my years at UNC, and I continue to learn at work and in external studying. I worked with some truly great people in ATN and computer science, namely my bosses in ResNet and the security folks.
Early in my college stint, one of my Red Hat machines was hacked literally minutes after I ifup'ed eth0. Needless to say, I took an immense amount of heat because that computer was subsequently used as a waypoint to launch a DoS. What a turning point. Those who've interacted with me since have known me to be extremely critical of standard security procedures at universities; I've been very outspoken in pushing the use of strict ssh2, strong passwords, forced password expiration, keeping current with application and service updates, reading and generally being security-conscious, and other what I consider security essentials from an administrator's viewpoint. I say this because most students don't care about the difference between ssh2 and telnet; they just want to check their email and download mp3s.
Which brings me to my second point. During my junior year, I was part of one of the first large OpenNap networks. Although the particular server I operated had the enable_share parameter disabled, the nature of the network setup allowed information transfer over the entire network and thus anyone--even on a host with sharing disabled, like mine--could retrieve search results for a song search. The RIAA wasn't too happy (I don't doubt this was discovered through napigator), and in the end I had to sign a number of documents promising I would never infringe copyrights again, use excessive network resources, etc. This is despite the fact that I was operating a completely legal OpenNap server--my boss at ResNet affirmed that I wasn't sharing.
What this goes to show is that universities with _competent_ security and copyright-aware folks will throw up a safety net for you _if you're doing the right thing_. The EULA for ResNet at UNC and various links already cited in the posting above make explicit the methodology of dealing with suspected copyright violation. While I wasn't happy at the time, I have to acknowledge that UNC gave me a lot of support for which I'm grateful. The basic point is "don't do any stupid, and you won't regret it." If however, the RIAA decides to chase you down as they did me, as long as you're within your proper use, you should be ok.
I've heard separate stories about mistreatments on separate protests, but those are unfortunately not things for which I can vouch.
"the evil p2p sucking up bandwidth" argument doesn't do didly squat. my school realized that p2p was sucking up 80% of bandwitdh... so now they rate limit p2p programs... and now p2p uses 4%.
students are happy, school is happy that students are happy, and school will only shut down a student if it is proven that the student has copyrighted material that she/he is uploading to other users... now, my school doesn't give a shit and they let RIAA worry about that...
once in a while RIAA catches a student with (c) stuff that they are uploading and sends an email to security... blah, blah, blah.
A friend of mine is a professor at Lewis and Clark college in Portland, OR, and he tells me that they purposefully do not block P2P of any kind. They consider this sort of a student recruitment tool. It does tend to clog their network on Friday and Saturday evenings when students are busy downloading MP3s and pr0n, but their response to the issue is to add more bandwidth to the Internet.
As far as they're concerned, it's one of the costs of doing business as a college these days.
Alternatley, the RIAA could never sue 2300 schools simultaneously. And could never afford to be sued by that many entities. Im sure they couldn't afford to be sued by 10% of the schools.
The RIAA can't beat 2300 colleges at anything. Their absolutle only hope is to pick on a single poor but well known college and beat them in court to set precident. Which is exactly what I expect to see soon.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
All the dubious trading between students at my Uni is done via burners and CDR. No P2P in sight.
Of course, since certain organizations accept a cut from each blank sale, very few students appear to see anything wrong with it.
Which doesn't actually make it right. But then again, if we weren't using the blank media for such purposes, then those same organizations would be stealing from us, would they not?
Data traffic, in the amounts consumed by individuals, has become too cheap to bill by the byte due to the glut in communications capacity.
Imagine an immense field of salad in a wilderness area (just imagine it, don't ask how the field got there...). You see 5 people arrive. They ask you if they can eat, and what the price will be. You know that these will be the only 5 to come by in the next month, and that after this month your salad will be spoiled.
Are you going to charge per leaf of salad, or are you going to charge them an 'all you can eat' price ?
Maybe it would be a good thing if everyone stopped "sharing" the RIAA's music. It would be even better if everyone stopped listening to it. Colleges could set up music servers containing only works for which free distribution has been authorized by the performers, composers, lyricists, etc. Geeks could write spiffy computer programs to reduce the administrative burdens of such arrangements. They could also develop popularity metrics and write programs to compute them.
All of this would help "localize" music. Often enough, local bands would want their music available freely on the local server in order to promote attendance at live performances. Fans would be better able to find suitable entertainment. Artists and fans would be able to meet other artists and fans with similar interests.
Obviously, a grand shift of this sort could have many economic, social and political consequences. When a formerly centralized industry becomes decentralized, the people formerly at the center lose. As Tuli Kupferburg wrote, "When the mode of the music changes, / The walls of the city shake." That might also be true of modes of distribution.
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Manifesto for the Peoples of the Third Millennium
Get off it. There never will be anything like "copyright lapsing through neglect". Neglect by who? For how long? How measured?
Probably not again, but yes, there used to be. Original provisions of copyright called for a 14 year term when you registered a copyright (neglect to register == no copyright) and renewable once (neglect to renew == no more copyright). As I said in my previous reply there, this sort of system was still in place until fairly recently. Automagic copyrighting of anything and everything anyone does is not how it has always been.
The excuses for theft conjured up by music pirates are just as venal and self-serving as the RIAA's excuses for using copyright to enforce a middleman's monopoly.
If you want to fight the concept of copyright itself, come out of the closet. If all you really want is free music, stay in the closet and keep your mouth shut.
A) I am not a music Pirate. I am, or was, one of the RIAAs better customers. Between my wife and I we own nearly a thousand CDs.
B) I do not wish to fight the concept of copyright itself. As Lessig, and most other modern minds interested in this debate, I feel that at it's heart copyright is a good idea. Allowing an author/inventor/artist to benefit directly from their creations is good for society. However as our copyright law has been written by big business interests and rubber stamped by congress the balance between the creator and society has gone far, far away from what it should be. So I am, and have been, coming out of the closet in that regard for years.
jello.
aka aron.
I'm confused about why Courtney Love is as bad as the rest. Every interview and statement that I've ever read of hers chastized the record industry and points out the failures and fraud that occur. Is she bad because of her music? Because she's branched out into other areas? Because she's a business woman? Because she wants to profit? Can you elaborate on your statement?
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
I should know. I intern as a tech for their their on campus response center(basically it's where the students take their computers when they have problems). One of our most common problems is slowness caused by spyware from p2p apps.
Recently a student that I helped had over a hundred peices of spyware, most of them from p2p.
Having a policiy on the books and enforcing it worth a damn are two totally difrent things.
procrastination is a way of life aka i'll think up a sig later