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Uni Students Slammed For Music Swapping
jomaree writes "The SMH Online reports that Sony, EMI and Universal will be in the Federal Court today, in an attempt to stop students using uni computers to swap music files. Michael Speck, the director of Music Industry Piracy Investigations, is quoted as follows: 'And we're not talking about one track here, one track there,' he said. 'We're talking piracy, significant examples of piracy.' By contrast, Sydney Uni says it knows of one student with a handful of files on a website, which does actually sound quite a bit like one track here, one track there."
Well, nobody has the right to distribute THEIR material without THEIR permission. Since everybody and their brother is fucking them over and pirating their music, they're going to do what they can to fight back, and I don't see how anyone could blame them.
Like I've said before, it's not fair for the vast majority of people to pirate things, and then piss and moan when the people they are ripping off push back.
evil adrian
I'm probably gonna get slammed for this, too bad.
Universities (and higher education in general) are havens for piracy. File/application swapping among stundents is the norm, but that's been going on for years and I don't think it's what anti-piracy groups have a problem with. They fear one thing: bandwidth.
The concern is two-pronged:
1. Students come to school and suddenly get hooked up to a fat pipe. Megabit-speed internet connectivity in dorms and computer labs. Little Johnny freshman sets up a couple of movies to download on edonkey and leaves for the weekend. During that weekend his 1mbps/1mbps pipe is almost saturated uploading. Johnny gets his movies and, before watching and deleting them, manages to share them with 200 other users.
Home users are usually much more aware of what's going on, maybe even more ignorant of their options. It's hard to stay ignorant when your dorm buddy's always finding new ways to download stuff.
2. Students working in computer science deparments setting up pirate sites. While P2P piracy is huge, traditional 'warez scene' piracy - while reaching less people directly - is probably just as big. It's hard to run a warez site from a private company, people are going to wonder where all the bandwidth is going. But slip that site into a university network, with it's goverment subisidized pipes and it's terabyte-class monthly transfers and it's just a pebble in a pond. With full access to the equipment, students can reroute traffic, shape other traffic to give their 'users' maximum transfers. They can make systems disapear to all faculty computers, or even all on-campus computers, just to cover their tracks.
Almost all of the top warez distribution sites I know (I'm talking WHQ and regional HQs for major groups) are run on university pipes. The rest are hidden among other major bandwidth hogs. (VoIP companies and the like)
Or, maybe the anti-piracy posse is just paranoid.