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Congress Asks Universities To Enforce Copyrights
Wes Felter writes "In CNet, Declan McCullagh writes that members of Congress are concerned that universities are not enforcing the 1997 No Electronic Theft Act which made simple copyright violations into a federal crime. Should universities be responsible for tracking down illegal sharing on their networks? Will ISPs be next?"
Universities have enough to deal with concerning their students, before they start wasting their money policing filesharing.
Just let them teach the classes. Let the students worry about the law.(or lack thereof)
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
At my school off campus trading is something that's been actively looked down upon... however trading over the campus network is encouraged... I think if anything is going to happen a standard needs to be found first.
Dont most universities already have a policy
that internet access can only be used for academoc purposes? Ours does.
that said, no one tried enforcing this yet.
Not to worry... the thought police will be around to handle this sort of thing soon.
-=sig=-
Maybe the university administrators have more important things to do (like, say, running a university) than hunting down students dling mp3's. Maybe congress doesn't understand that some of us have REAL jobs that require more than going around and kissing other people's asses.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Why is there always an assumption of guilt when dealing with file sharing?
This type of draconian heavy-handed measure is an insult. Why is the burben of proof on the individual and not the government?
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Either someone is taking the mickey, or this politician really needs to get a sense of proportion.
And now instead of not getting to graduate because of thousands of dollars in library fines, students get to be ousted for copyright infringement.
Ironic, however, this connection between P2P and a Library. Wha?
Create a P2P *wireless* sharing device. Just load it up with stuff and go cruise around at your favorite public sharing area... I'm sure that we'll see this in campus yards as soon as students lose the right to steal their music and other stuff. They'll just create their own network to share stuff on...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Educational institutions are no more responsible for student file swapping than they are for student drinking and driving. "Loco parentis" is NOT the responsibility of educational institutions, thoght many folks think they are and should be, including the university administrative class known as "Diaper Deans"
Students are adults and responsible for their own behavior.
The NET Act asserts criminality in the event of deliberate money making or valuable materials copying as opposed to simple breach of copyright.
Is Congress asserting that universities are overlooking that or merely that copyright breaches are possible and not investigated?
I went to the University of Missouri - Columbia which suffered from severe bandwidth shortages due to file sharing. So they implemented some traffic fingerprinting technology (PacketHound) to keep the file swappers from eating all the bandwidth at prime time, then let them play during the middle of the night. I suppose similar technology could be used to totally disallow file sharing, as I think it has to be all or nothing. You cannot really watch each file traded and then check for copyrights.
Scott, Keeper of the Crystal Flame
If the government wants Universities to start cracking down on Copyright infringement, or ISP's for that matter. They should either give them money/grants to fund the resources necessary to do this or send them a couple of people trained on how to do this.
I always thought it was the governments job to enforce the laws - not public/private organizations.
Wait a minute...
If they think that ".edu" network admins (who are often students themselves) will enforce stupid RIAA rules, they are, in effect, asking the foxes to guard the henhouse!
Seriously, I remember, at my old university [no names given, for obvious reasons] that the admins used to have close to 50+GB of mp3s archive... =)
This being said, this has also been the case in the past 3 companies I work with... Maybe this is the solution to piracy: ask that kind of admins to take care of the piracy problem... then, turn around and pretend the problem has been solved! Case closed! =)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I think it sounds useless, since whatever they do to prevent sharing of illegal software, the students (the smart once anyway) will find a way around it somehow. They could always set up their own networks for example.
At my school they blocked the FTP port and IRC port, but students found ways around that too. It just won't do, unless they have a supersmart mastereplan of some sort.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
At our school, we seem to have someone that carefully watches everything. This man must spend hours a day trying to stop people from using Kazaa and other P2P programs. Everyonce in a while he'll get an e-mail from the MPAA stating that someone has been sharing a movie that's not even in the theater yet and they'll sue the school if it's not stopped. As long as you have an open network, people are going to find ways to share files. Putting pressure on the University is just going to make life a lot more difficult for administration and for students.
Once they are forced to monitor, they will be legally accountable for any 'leaks' or 'actions' they don't catch. As well as the end user of course.
Its a dangerous thing to hold accountable 'carriers' of content that flows across them..
Whets next, the phone company? The US Postal service? FedEx? A gun store? Wal-Mart?
How about AMEX when someone uses a purchase for illegal activities...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Under a 1997 law called the No Electronic Theft Act (NET Act), it is a federal crime to willfully share copies of copyrighted products such as software, movies or music with anyone if the value of the work exceeds $1,000 or if the person hopes to receive files in return. Violations are punishable by one year in prison, or if the value tops $2,500, "not more than five years" in prison.
I hope they mean 'value' as in 'sticker price' and not 'value' as in 'worth money' because Mozilla alone has saved me **AT** **LEAST** $1000 in therapy and counseling over pop-up ads, spyware and stupid-ass animations so its overall value is probably much higher than $0.
What about other OSS like Enterprise RedHat? Can't you install that on a bunch of boxen for the after you pay the $1500 price tag?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Well, given that, according to the article, you can get 5 years in prison for sharing files, I'd say the law considers it pretty serious.
I wonder what would happen when a college student is jailed for 5 years for sharing his cd-collection over the internet. Would there be massive demonstrations, and public outrage, or would everyone still be either indifferent, or posting about it on Slashdot?
Just to be safe, college administrations have to assume that all files are copyright by Hollywood and the RIAA. No original work should be done on college campuses. It's just too risky - when big business, backed by jackbooted government thugs, will question every file that every student has. Instead, colleges should buy all course materials straight from Hollywood and the RIAA, with (of course) Digital Rights Management software on every computer giving big business the right to monitor everything that goes on.
According to a recent article in the newspaper at my former college, they've already recieved letters from Peachnet (keepers of the 'net connection). I heard rumors for years about FBI raids in the dorms, and almost yearly people would go in a panic backing up harddrives and taking their computers home for the week. Looks like the threat is finally real. Not that I'm saying anyone was actually guilty...I'm just saying :)
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
As an edu admin myself, I have a repsonsibility for the content of my networks, which includes those nodes attached to them.
The same way that i am liable for illegal use of unlicensed software, not the premises. (Bizarre, and a pain, hence why I'm a tad zealous...)
Although the university I went to didn't go out of its way to track down those who used file sharing, they did try to clamp down on it with bandwidth limiters, prioritizing common ports and packet types. But those of us who were good enough were always able to get around it. Hopefully we'll still be good enough when they start monitoring traffic to try to catch us. But then that's what libraries and laptops are for...
stock markup felons, to stop being such Godless greed/fear based fauxking whinIE pukes.
that should do it. lookout bullow. run for your options, if you have any.
This is a serious issue. We are not talking about a single misguided politician here. This is the result of an insidious, deliberate, and concerted effort by the *AA to abuse language in order to confuse people's sense of proportion and their sense of ethics. False analogies, shock-treatment and abuse of language are very effective propaganda tools, and that is what we are seeing here.
See what RMS has to say (from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html) :
Fight this language FUD! Refuse to use FUD terms. Read the above mentioned article on gnu.org and point people to it. It can go a long way in putting things in true perspective and controlling the power of the *AA.
every time there's a story like this, someone will
come in and say that filesharing has legitimate
purposes as well etc etc..
BUT.. fact is.. the vast majority of, and I mean vast, files
on p2p are illegal.
Now.. consider this.. say there was this little bar.. where 5% drank beer and were jolly happy.. and the rest, 95%, were trading illegally stolen properties like furniture and microwave ovens and whatever.. and they were doing it casually, and everyone in the entire city knew about it.. it was widely known in every media like internet, tv etc.. so what do you think the police would have done? Exactly.. and it would have hurt those 5% who actually did what you're supposed to do in a bar.
Would this imply that all bars should be shut down because people could do illegal stuff there? Hardly.. BUT.. if there is a place that is known for illegal stuff, even though it also has legal uses, shold it not be shut down?
So basically.. it is easy to observe p2p networks.. those who are legal, should be let alone.. those which are mostly illegal, should be shut down.. it doesn't matter..
and in fact, the vast majority of p2p networks are mostly illegal in their contents. Because let's face it, there is simply NO WAY the majority of files on big p2p networks WON'T be illegal.. you could say it's the right thing to do to give humans the benefit of doubt, but it is a simple facet of human nature that if people can share illegal digital files on p2p networks, they WILL do so.. and it is also so in real life.
If 9 out of 10 people in a place are doing criminal stuff, surely that should be enough to shut down the place, even if it would hurt the rest 10%.. this is how it works elsewhere, why shouldn't it be the same for p2p?
If that's the case, most of the sites I visit will be classified as art sites, where I can truly appreciate the female form. Especially with another female form.
I can hunt down those responsible for stealing my car!
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Any filesharing servers that were on our networks protected them selves with heavy logging. The computing department became surprisingly lenient when faced with evidence that the largest downloaders were on their staff. Of course our esteemed leader was less than competent, not even know which official servers were running. Foxes guarding hen houses is not such a bad idea. They will protect them for their own and they will know best how to. Not only that but i imagine that they are heavy net users and will throttle filesharing during normal hours for their benefit as well as other users. The best person to see if a system is vulnerable is a good cracker... employ them instead of fighting them.
No one can and no one will force people find ways to share whartever they want. It might sound either as a truism or just hope, but that's what's gonna happen. Wheather someone wants it or not, they are allways going to be people able to circumvent any control measure, it is the human nature. And if this is going to be free or at low cost that will mean popularity...
Colleges will generally go as far as possible to avoid bringing in the police. Cynically, it's bad public relations to be connected with crime. It's only been in recent years that most campuses have been shamed into encouraging rapes to be reported. Rapes are the obvious case where we should want the police in. But what about gay sex in the states where that's still illegal? What about kids having a beer? Smoking a joint?
The law is traditionally less restrictive on the privileged - trusts them to have a native sense of good that may be more refined that that in the code books. Thus Geo. Bush Jr., faced with a law that said he had to serve in the military, got into the National Guard and got away with skipping duty - didn't even show up for that - for a year. Okay, so there are times where this exception is regrettable. But his grandfather stole the skull of an Indian child from a cemetary as a Skull & Bones prank. There are pretty serious laws about this, but they weren't applied - he was a privileged student.
Still, the law is a regrettable intrusion that should only be applied when human beings are not behaving themselves - when real harm is being done to someone other than themselves. Busting a student for drinking a beer or sharing a song does more harm than good to people. Beer and songs are both positive things, on the whole. And anyone who has behaved and studied well enough to get into college should be trusted to be not as in need of supervision by the law as someone who had neither the internal discipline nor intelligence to get there.
A society overly concerned with enforcing laws - especially laws which serve business but not human interests - is violating the fundamental right of humans to live a good life as they see fit. Policing, in itself, is not a virtue, and is a value only to dictators.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
So university administrators should be held reponsible for the actions of their clients? Among other things, remember, students are not (typically) employees.
If this flies, then I think members of Congress should also be held personally responsible for any and all undesireable actions taken by any resident of the United States. Obviously they could be doing more to prevent criminal behaviour. Because they are not, because criminals still roam the streets, they should be held liable.
Can anyone point to a good place to read more about all the idiot ideas floating around in Congress? I'd like to get a better handle on who the real bozos are who float this kind of stupid shit.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
I'm sitting here wading through a mountain of requests from the media companies while I work at my campus helpdesk. They demand that we "deactivate their accounts" and "block their IP addresses" immediately or face punishment ourselves.
Here's a copy of the email that they send:
--
RE: Unauthorized Distribution of the Copyrighted Motion Picture Entitled
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Dear xxxxxx:
We are writing this letter on behalf of New Line Cinema, a division of Time Warner Entertainment Company, L.P. ("New Line").
As you may know, New Line is the holder of rights under copyright, including exclusive distribution rights, in and to the motion picture(s) listed above.
No one is authorized to perform, exhibit, reproduce, transmit, or otherwise distribute the above-mentioned work(s) without the express written permission of New Line, which permission New Line has not granted to 0.0.0.0.
We have received information that an individual has utilized the above-referenced IP address at the noted date and time to offer downloads of the above-mentioned work through a "peer-to-peer" service.
The attached documentation specifies the location on your network where the infringement occurred, the number of repeat violations recorded at this specific location, as well as any available identifying information.
The distribution of unauthorized copies of copyrighted motion pictures constitutes copyright infringement under the Copyright Act, Title 17 United States Code Section 106(3). This conduct may also violate the laws of other countries, international law, and/or treaty obligations.
Since you own this IP address, we request that you immediately do the following:
1) Disable access to the individual who has engaged in the conduct described above; and
2) Terminate any and all accounts that this individual has through you.
On behalf of Warner Bros., owner of the exclusive rights to the copyrighted material at issue in this notice, we hereby state, pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Title 17 United States Code Section 512, that we have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by Warner Bros., its respective agents, or the law.
Also pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we hereby state that we believe the information in this notification is accurate, and, under penalty of perjury, that MediaForce is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the exclusive rights being infringed as set forth in this notification.
Please contact us at the above listed address or by replying to this email should you have any questions.
We appreciate your assistance and thank you for your cooperation in this matter. In your future correspondence with us, please refer to Case ID xxxxxxx.
Your prompt response is requested.
--
Methinks that this mediaforce place needs to be firebombed. Take a look at their website and you'll see some pretty creepy things that they do, like 24/7 scanning of P2P, IRC, FTP, and other networks for copyrighted works. Worst of all, they reinject corrupt copies of the data back into the networks to much downloads up for the users.
If I worked there I'd just go home and slit my wrists every damn day
We've been very fortunate that ISPs haven't been bending easily to help track and control copyright enfringement. But there's a good chance the ISPs won't stay out of it forever. I'm hoping wireless mesh networks take off. Eventually it could mean no more ISPs at all. Buy your hardware and you're in. The next time we can worry a little less is when there's no service provider needed to wire us into the internet.
Developers: We can use your help.
Copyrights and patents are pathetic. It temporarily protects an individual entity's profit. And at the same time halts progress on a piece of work or invention to make it better.
Don't you think there could be a better microwave by now?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
if you're running samba, nfs or a nt machine (which has entire hard drives shared automatically), then you're guilty as well.
congress would do better to stop this sharing of "files" by restricting network traffic to text http only and requiring everyone to use lynx. innovation just frustrates big money entertainmentand must be stopped.
Since when were universities law-enforcement? However it's not surprising that congress would be riding schools about it. After all, someone's probably lining their pockets to do it.
Breaking a law, is breaking a law. The responsibility of enforcing laws falls on law enforcement, like the police, FBI, you get the picture. Schools have a job to teach their students, keep them fed and safe. Not to be baby-sitters and watchdogs for the government.
The irony is that student tuition is income for the schools. They use it to pay teachers, get books, computer labs...and bandwidth as well.
A lot of schools already took voluntary mesurements to limit the p2p bandwidth hogging. This i can understand.
What exactly is the incentive for universities to become the copyright police? What are they getting out of this? As far as I can tell, there just getting bitched at by the RIAA and congress. Unless either one of them gives scools financial support to aid in napping copyright offenders, there isn't any incentive for them. What are they going to do? Take schools to court because there's songs floating around their networks?
Some things cease to amaze me. Other things however, never cease.
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
We have universities actually giving out things like ShareScan (e.g. university of Toronto). At McMaster they give out ResX, a KaZaA clone that works within the university only (to only take down the LAN, not the pipe to the net at least :D ). In fact of most of the universities I've visited (I'm in grade 13 getting ready to go next year) the universities have been basically anti-file-sharing in press releases but in reality very much pro-file-sharing. Whatever keeps the students happy I guess.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
Certainly, I think it's important for universities to put an end to the free-flow of information through their campuses. I mean, imagine the damage caused to society if universities just flagrantly allowed students to share intellectual property without a whim for who owns it! What a disaster it could be, as profit margins begin from students acquiring someone else's IP. I cannot imagine anything worse.
Why bother.
They wanted to define "sharing copyrighted material with the purpose of recieveing copyrighted material" as having commerical interest in sharing, in short making all illegal P2P sharing criminal offenses. Anyone know if they succeeded, sounded like a pretty cheap shot to me, but that's not exactly a surprise.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There are murders, rapists, and other offenders of such unspeakable crimes walking the streets in our country, yet a college student downloading "Margarita Ville" is a criminal that deserves to be arrested for breaking a copyright law. What the hell is going through congress' minds? We have a budget crisis enough as it is and we can't even rid our streets of homeless people but we'll spend millions of dollars protecting an already overly-wealthy industry from an 18 year old kid that just wants to listen to a song? Where are the priorities in this country?
Don't worry. Palladium will come along and solve all of your 'fair use' problems.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Just cut out the middleman. The government wants someone else to do the law enforcement? Deputize the Netwoirk Admins...Uzi and pocket protector snandard equipment.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Ever heard of campus security? This could be considered an extension of it. Also, a sysadmin is responsible for his network. If his network is determined to be the source of violations, officials come to him. If he can't track down the offenders, then it's HIS ass and HIS job on the line, which is more than enough incentive for him to keep his network in check.
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
Funny...
:-(
Reading all this, I get the impression that most people don't mind being spied upon, if it doesn't burden the admins too much
Are you really that brain washed? What will be next? Reporting students that are using the net to gain access to ideas that are too liberal. Well, they are all potential terrorists, after all. I mean, people who would steal money from those poor music publishing companies, are obviously terrorists.
What? Merely a "federal crime", and not an act of terrorism yet?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
in a prosecution because it is so badly written that prosecutors won't touch it.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Why are they screaming about P2P? What about radar detectors? Radar detectors are there to help drivers break laws--they have no other purpose. Breaking the speed-limit laws makes a driver much more likely to kill someone.
Unfortunately, people killed by speeding drivers don't make campaign contributions. File-sharing hasn't caused any deaths that I know about...
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
And that 1% that is useful attributes ~80% of the work on *BSD, Mozilla, Linux and KDE. Just to name a few minor projects. Jeah, I think that's a great idea, really suitable for a free country too.
...these subcommitee members must be getting really worried about losing their re-election campaign contributions from Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley.
Yeah, I'm sure universities will be just as able to stop file sharing as they will with stopping pot and underaged alchohol use.
-Derick
If P2P networks were not allowed for file sharing and music sharing, what's to say, I don't call home and ask my little junior high school brother to go into my room, grab a "Jimmy Buffet CD" and rip it then put all the songs on LimeWire, call them "Rus's Own Collection 1-15" - I go on LimeWire and get my OWN songs for a party that night. Who's to say, that just before my computer at home is scrapped that I want all the programs off of it. I own legitimate copies at home on my shelf in MY bedroom. I ask my Dad to hook up the hard drive into an external enclosure and put the files up on LimeWire for me to download?
Further, what the RIAA (pushing this "mentioned in the article enforcement" with Congress) doesn't understand is, it's been college students who have SOLD MILLIONS of singles because of p2p. They saw the Mitsubishi Commercials, went on KAzaa or LimeWire or Napster and typed in "Mitsubishi commercial" not knowing the artist or title of the song. Less than a month goes by, each Mitsubishi commercial has been a #1 or top 5 hit. EVERY ONE. Mitsubishi even claims on their website selling 6 million singles for Telepopmusik (Just Breathe), Wiseguys (Start The Commotion), Dirty Vegas (Days Go By) - all three of those songs were almost certainly spread because of college P2P and then subsequent college Radio play. NO ONE (less than 5% of the US population) had ever heard of ANY of those groups I'm sure before the commercials and before p2p.
Take the same example. I hear the Mitsubishi commercial, go into Tower or Sam Goody, or ANY music store. I say, "Do you have that song off the new Mitsubishi Commercial?" You get one of three replies: "Howzit go?" "Whozit by?" - "I don't watch TV or no I haven't seen it" - in any case even if they can gather what song it is, if it's a new Mitsubishi Commercial THEY NEVER HAVE IT!
I downloaded, recently, the entire Chicago (movie) soundtrack. I wanted to see if it was better than the Broadway CD I own. It was. I went out and bought it. I can't sample like that in ANY store and none of the songs have been on the radio.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
right now a wireless network is too expensive for a student. After all, so many students are in dept from loans to pay for college in the first place. Maybe when wireless becomes cheaper, the entir city will be a giant p2p network. Yum! ^^
YOU SUCK BALLS!
It will be a major uphill battle for institutes of higher education.
If anything more creative and private means for file sharing will be born, accelerating the demise of the RIAA.
Bring it on!
What ever happened to personal responsibility? You don't shut down a highway because people speed on it. You don't shut down a motel because hookers and crack dealers use it. You would shut down a pawn shop that was fencing stuff, but only because the owner would be put in jail and be unable to run the shop.
You arrest the people breaking the law and remove *them* from the equation. If 9 out of 10 people in a place are doing criminal stuff, enforce the law against THEM.
Sheesh.
What about universities/schools themselves using pirated software!?
Software for "free" like Windows, Office, Rational Rose, Visual Studio (and
Giving them away to the students.
And you want to stop filesharing between students? Yeah yeah yeah
people, for the most part, automatically give fair value for value recieved. the small # of folks who avoid paying for things, does NOT affect legitimate commerce.
.controll, is to fuel the dying gangsterious last gasp efforts of the evile ill eagle kingdumb, & IT's phonIE payper bullshipping industry. we cannot afford to support such execrable (yesterdaze word).
the badtoll here is: how much more monIE can these greed/fear based stock markup frauds, extract from US, without returning anything?
it's write in the pairabulls. those who graft without adding value, shall see their 'fortunes' fade in the gnu millennium.
remember, people will almost AWAYS, automatically, PAY fair value for goods/services received. the only need for excessive
tell 'em robbIE.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So, these companies don't want us copying their stuff? Fine! Let's all just use free software. No more "pirated" copies of WinXP and all that shizat. Who needs it? Is it really worth committing a federal crime to get a hold of such crap?
I suppose if everyone did that they'd make it against the law to distribute free software...
I think that's a great idea. Here in the UK politicians have been obsessed with "League Tables" for everything - hospitals, police forces, schools etc etc. The only Public Service which does not seem to be rated and monitored like this are the politicians. I would really like to see league tables for policians, how many of their initiatives have worked, how many wasted money for a while and were shelved, how many times they have lied in interviews etc. I imagine they would find some 'very good' reasons not to implement this kind of system because the results would not be terribly positive. I am going to write to my MP now and ask her to suggest it.
I'm beginning to wonder how stupidly easy it is going to become to frame someone... ...I mean, you send them "mid-term-lecture.mp3" which is in fact, the latest Britney song; the FEDS recognise the file's signature and POW instant jail time.
Machine9dotNet
I was a freshman in college in 1998 and we (the techy's) were sat down and told to not *serve up* illegal, copyrighted materials. They went as far as monitoring specific rooms and actually dismissed a student for having an mp3 ftp site. Back in those days *ahem* an mp3 ftp site consisted of a 3gb hard drive with 50-100 songs. Now, god knows what students are doing. I can only imagine that mp3 piracy is second to movie and DVD piracy now. The problem then becomes the U.'s are dealing with Hollywood and all their pull. The question must become, when does it end? God knows if I know the answer to that.
I ask for a car and I get a computer. How's about that for being born under a bad
You are an ass. Universities are enslaved by long term software contracts to the tune of millions of dollars a semester let alone a year. At my school, Microsoft audits so much that they should just set up a branch office down the hall. And we still have to pay fees for grossly obsolete and hardly utilized software like Lotus Notes. If you go the the University computer store and get free software or deeply discounted titles, then assume it is coming out of your tuition and/or the taxpayer's pockets.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I remember back reading that FreeNet was going to come along and help solve some of the problems -- multiplatform, encrypted, anonymous, etc....
They've been on version 0.5 for what seems like 3 years now. WFT? When is P2P going to advance to the next level? Secure? Encrypted? And, completely anonymous? Someone should build in a DoS attack into it as well to take down these bastards who are sending out "cease and decist" emails to all the Universities and ISPs.
When will we have secure P2P that can't be f*cked with by Universities, Law enforcement, ISP's, etc....????
I work for end-user support for a major university. Just last week I had forwarded to me a letter advising us to police one of the computers on our network for a copyright violation. (By the IP addy and computer name, I think it's a student computer.) This proposal by congress just seems like part of a larger campaign of the various entertainment conglomerates. (Check out the letter; there's a real rogue's gallery there.)
...
We still haven't found the computer in question. I'm still not sure what we would do about it if we found it. (Probably ask the user to delete it, or remove it from the network.)
My question... this seems like something automatically generated. Is it? Have other universities received similar requests?
---
From: MPAA@copyright.org [mailto:MPAA@copyright.org]
Subject: Unauthorized Distribution of Copyrighted Motion Pictures
MOTION PICTURE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC.
15503 VENTURA BOULEVARD
ENCINO, CALIFORNIA 91436
UNITED STATES
Anti-Piracy Operations
PHONE: (818) 728 - 8127
Email: MPAA@copyright.org
Friday, February 21, 2003
Via Fax/Email
RE: Unauthorized Distribution of Copyrighted Motion Pictures
Reference#: XXXXXX
Dear abuse@XXXXXX.edu:
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) represents the following motion picture production and distribution companies:
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.
Disney Enterprises, Inc.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.
Paramount Pictures Corporation
TriStar Pictures, Inc.
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
United Artists Pictures, Inc.
United Artists Corporation
Universal City Studios, LLLP
Warner Bros., a Division of Time Warner Entertainment Company, L.P.
We have received information that you are providing Internet access to and possibly hosting the above referenced internet site, which is offering downloads of copyrighted motion picture(s) including such
title(s) as:
The distribution of unauthorized copies of copyrighted motion pictures constitutes copyright infringement under the Copyright Act, Title 17 United States Code Section 106(3). This conduct may also violate the laws of other countries, international law, and/or treaty obligations.
We request that you immediately do the following:
1) Disable access to this site;
2) Remove this site from your server; and
3) Take appropriate action against the account holder under your Abuse Policy/Terms of Service Agreement.
By copy of this letter, the owner of the above referenced Internet site and/or email account is hereby directed to cease and desist from the conduct complained of herein.
On behalf of the respective owners of the exclusive rights to the copyrighted material at issue in this notice, we hereby state, pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Title 17 United States Code Section 512, that the information in this notification is accurate and that we have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owners, their respective agents, or the law.
Also pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we hereby state, under penalty of perjury, that we are authorized to act on behalf of the owners of the exclusive rights being infringed as set forth in this notification.
Please contact us at the above listed address or by replying to this email should you have any questions. Kindly include the above noted Reference # in the subject line of all email correspondence.
We thank you for your cooperation in this matter. Your prompt response is requested.
Respectfully,
Thomas Temple
Director
Worldwide Internet Enforcement
Should universities be responsible for tracking down illegal sharing on their networks? Will ISPs be next?
Self policing, what a policy... turn the people on themselves... "Everyone's responsible to report and turn in the Jews^H^H^H^HCriminals!"
Snooze and you lose your sushi.
Because if the files you were exchanging were legitimate, you wouldn't need to use peer-to-peer systems like Gnutella, Freenet etc etc, which add a lot of inefficiency just to make it harder to find the source of a file. If what you are sending weren't in some way illegal, you would just stick it on a web page.
There is the possibility that peer-to-peer can prevent Slashdotting by using bandwidth in different places rather than all at a central server, but I find it hard to imagine that students using P2P are doing so out of the goodness of their hearts to cut their university's bandwidth bill.
Seriously, most P2P *transfers* are directly peer-to-peer, just look up the IP. If they used HTTP servers, how would I know of them? Portscan? And how would I find a file in an easy way? An HTTP site doesn't have to have any index (think directory trees) or search box, should I spider all directories and make my own search tool?
The entire clue-stick is that you're taking a bunch of *peers*, each hosting their own share, and it'll appear as one big "server" you can search. The only real issue is file integrity, unless you have a checksum you can trust to go by (as opposed to normally you'd trust the download location, like e.g. tucows), you don't know that you're getting a virus / trojan / spam / fake / corrupt / whatever version and not the real thing.
And judging by some internal network shares / P2P systems, you're just plain wrong. If they downloaded all of that off some central server, it would be literally killed. It'd have to server out gigabits *per second* to keep up with the total trading of a huge bunch of peers. But one thing I'll give you - it's not out of the goodness of their hearts.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
In court cases, I think it was the napster rulings, judges have ruled that P2P filesharing constitutes "commercial" copyright infringement. So there's your answer. P2P is a crime. Do it and go to jail.
This shouldn't be really under "Your Rights Online" because when it comes to P2P of copyrighted material, you have no rights; you are a criminal.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
1. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Uploading data from your computer isn't illegal.
2. If a crime has happened, then the police should investigate it and take appropriate measures. RIAA or any other organisation shouldn't be allowed to take the law in their own hands.
Our boss keeps shooting the requisition down for a cheap Mossberg. Nothing talks to a dorm full of music thieves like buckshot. We do have a pistol in the On Call kit. Three bullets -- one for the equipment, one for the user and one for yourself.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I work for a university and let me tell you - full-time staff staring at logs aching for a violation of policy. And a computer in the phone switch room that likes to listen to and records phone conversations. It knows about key words. Ask them about it and none of it exists.
It is sad what tax payers monies are wasted on.
Well, the moral high ground is the only place with elbow room anymore.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Because if the files you were exchanging were legitimate, you wouldn't need to use peer-to-peer systems like Gnutella, Freenet etc etc, which add a lot of inefficiency just to make it harder to find the source of a file. If what you are sending weren't in some way illegal, you would just stick it on a web page.
You have just demonstrated a woeful lack of understanding of the fundamental technologies, both of client server architectures (upon which ftp and web servers are based) and peer-to-peer technologies such as gnutella, freenet, etc.
In a peer to peer environment, the more demand a particular file has, the more widely it becomes available, and the quicker it is to download. This is precisely the opposite of the "slashdot effect" so commonly seen on traditional, client/server setups (such as virtually every web page on the planet). Debian's apt-get and Gentoo's emerge would both benefit greatly, in terms of performance, by distributing their files (source tarballs, debs, ebuilds) via a peer-to-peer architecture rather than the ftp, html, and rsync client/server architectures they use now. Indeed, once keyrings and GPG signing has been implimented, they are likely to move to this, both for redundancy and performance purposes.
Properly designed peer to peer is the future of legitimate filesharing, as it removes one of the critical bottlenecks that has plagued the internet since its inception. Whether the specific implimentation is gnutella or, with our current jackbooted thugs in Washington, more and more likely Freenet, isn't really all that relevant. Performance requirements and the need for robustness and redundancy are already leading more and more so-called mainstream uses of peer-to-peer technology.
Oh, and by the way, TCP/IP is fundamentally a peer-to-peer platform, so next time you hear some fat, filthy rich, and corrupt media moghul talk about the evils of peer-to-peer technology, likely in the context of lobbying congress to ban it outright, keep in mind that they are talking about banning the fundamental design of the internet protocols themselves.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I agreee. If the law cannot be enforced without coercing private organizations into becoming arms of government, than the law is not just in the first place.
Would you want the government to enforce the GPL on the behalf of private organizations?
If not, we may as well wipe our asses with it.
Universities are for teaching students, and smaller universities don't have the resources to track down everyone who shares files accross a network. Larger universities don't have the resources because they're using their extra funds for research, which is far more valuable than cracking down on copyright law violations, especially from cracking down on the population that can't afford the copyrighted products in the first place.
As a college student, I've probably gotten about 20 MP3s through filesharing services, bought three CDs for $50, and three DVDs for $60. All of those purchases were made my freshman year, when I thought my money would go far. It is also worth noting that I downloaded the MP3s from two out of the three CDs before I made the purchase. Since then, I haven't had money to purchase these items, and I don't think that my filesharing would do anything to discourage me from purchasing CDs, because I don't have the money to make the purchases in the first place.
In the long run, we're all dead.
You don't have to set up base stations and run cable to do this... I can go to any place on campus with a friend of mine and we can share music and other things back and forth between our laptops on a computer-to-computer network. We're off the campus network, so they can't sniff the traffic, and I'm sure since the equipment and network we create is ours, they can't sniff it anyway. And besides that, I'd like to see the RIAA or MPAA come here and try to find our network.
'I bent my wookie'-Ralph Wiggum
So where do you put the 100s of CS majors who spend hours coding over that useless internet connection? how many computers are in the lab at your school? Do you want to have to sleep in line for a week to use one?
Has anyone in Congress considered the fact that enforcing such strictures will likely soon be impossible? Even now, the act of policing how people are using their computer would involve invading their privacy.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the natural evolution of this technology will be to add encryption. On top of that, perhaps use mix-net or other anonymizing technology. Run all the traffic over port 443. How do you police that? Bet you can't wait to tell your boss that the $50,000 you spent on a Packeteer is down the toilet. We read recently how Microsoft is collecting information about your computer every time you do an update. Perhaps we should pass legislation which mandates that people disclose the contents of their hard drives without warrent? Give me a break.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
"the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords..., for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright"
To me, that says if you copy software to learn it (like visual studio to learn c#), that is fair use.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Funny, it seems to me that there was assault and battery AND murder in congress; where is the big crackdown? Amazing how when laws start affecting congresswhores, laws (and interns) seem to dissapear. I thought goverment was by, for, and all about the goddamn people - when did it turn into a service to the highest bidder? Where is equal protection and justice under the law?
"While I'm sympathetic to the young people, they're breaking the law," warned Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. "Until the university or this committee is going to do something about it, we're wasting everyone's time."
First of all Maxine, we don't care if you're 'sympathetic to the young people'. That's crap. If you were, you would work to change the law, rather than pursue a unpopular law.
Maxine, you are sympathetic to the money ($12,500) you recieved from the Entertainment industry, much like your pal. meh.
Isn't it a tad bit ironic that the bits and bytes
that stay put after being copied are viewed as
"stolen" in the same way that physical property
is stolen?
As far as I can tell, the GPL is enforcable without the need to subsidize distributors of GPL software.
If congress wants the law enforced then they need to fund the enforcement.. which they will never do..
Sounds like RIAA has been checkmated
Don't Tread on OpenSource
In this case, you couldn't even decide which one it is by looking at the contents of the file.
Free as in mason.
once you create art, it should belong to the public
I see a lot of art being bought by the Forbes 400 folk and being stashed away in their private sitting parlors.
Lets plunder their palacious trappings in the name of free art!!
Death to the art oppressors!!!
Naw, I think I'll go get a slurpee instead.
Unfortunately I don't have the list with me but someone posted a good list on /. awhile ago. IT's a pretty comprehensive list of all the IPs used by all the scanning companies (private companies that have magically become cops) for the media industry. Just deny any any for all those IP addressess. At this point, you are under no legal obligation to let them look at your network, so why allow them to?
I don't know about the US, but here a recent study showed that 70% of the pupils here in Norway pirate music. Crossreference that with the number of broadband users and you realize that many of them download off dial-up connections (ISDN dial-up is common though). *When* everyone has broadband (and it's no doubt in my mind it'll become a commodity fairly fast), I think that will be pushing damn close to 100%.
It's about as common as going 5 over the speed limit, and you're not a threat to your own, your passengers or public safety either. Sure, it's still illegal and you'll get a fine if they pull you over, but noone *cares*. Give it a few years and those'll be the voters and the ones in power. Somehow I don't think they'd want to do anything *effective* to stop it.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There's no way i could decide wether this is (-1, Troll) or (+1, Funny).
Free as in mason.
From my experiance of 2 UK uni's. One had a fairly strict (and low) bandwidth cap of about 1Gb/day and the other was totally lax, allowing a friend of mine to run a 40Gb/day (higher when he managed to scank a 100Mbit connection for a while) server for 5 years.
My guess is that it depends on how desperate the uni is for bandwidth as to how desperate it is to stop the students enjoying the (illegal) fruits of a good connection. And little to do with the legality or otherwise of the hosted traffic
My spelling isn't bad, I'm evolving the language
Yep, I know. Their pop-ups are pretty weird, especially that fade-in/fade-out display.
They sent me an email, a long time ago, saying the pop-up could be disabled or some such. I have to find it and disable the *$$!!!! sucker... and update the web site (sigh)... =(
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Come on, it's the next logical step. After all, not a week goes by without reading about some musican or other doing drugs - it's clear they're just the top of the drug orgy iceberg that is the music "industry".
But I guess the RIAA wouldn't want to lobby for that...
At the university that I worked for the tech to person ratio was around 1 to 120 computers. At the time the tech was required to also keep several different servers running. In a college of about 500-600 computers we had 5 techs full time. We were required to manage Novell, NT, Unix servers, handle web page creation for classes, and early on handle student accounts (later taken away due to a central control issue at the university).
Student web pages were particularly questioned -
- pornographic content
- selling things on university equipment
- copyrighted materials
- etc....
Had I aggressively policed that then servers would have been down, labs would'nt have worked, professors couldn't have done their work, you name it and from the dean's office it would have looked like one of the techs was just sitting in his/her office doing nothing all day long.It has gotten better there btw. In addition to the 5 techs they now have 2 people whose sole job is to take care of servers (and figure out how to distribute/manage licensed software, and email complaints, and viruses, and step in and do regular tech stuff, and fix the occasional home users computer, etc)
At the university level they throttled the bandwidth for those services down to a crawl - still workks just too slow to be usefull
If they aren't aggressively policing their networks its because they kind of have their plates full.
I highly suggest working for the tech department of any college/university even part time - they are almost always hiring and almost always need the help- great and diverse tech education!
Like the schools can keep up with this. I predict state-funded schools will have no choice, and the private orgs will tell them to go fuck themselves.
Blar.
If 9 out of 10 people in a place are doing criminal stuff, surely that should be enough to shut down the place, even if it would hurt the rest 10%.. this is how it works elsewhere, why shouldn't it be the same for p2p?
....repeat ad nauseum
RIAA: "There's a bunch of cars speeding down highway 45, all other highways are ok."
Cops: "Okay, we've blocked highway 45 of traffic"
RIAA: "There's a bunch of cars speeding down highway 34, all other highways are ok."
Cops: "Okay, we've blocked highway 34 of traffic"
RIAA: "There's a bunch of cars speeding down highway 66, all other highways are ok."
Cops: "Okay, we've blocked highway 66 of traffic"
Legal car drivers: Why are all the highways blocked?
You can block a P2P place, shuffle the people around a bit. But as long as there are millions of people that want to trade P2P, they'll just move to some other net, unless you want to shut down the whole infrastructure (read: Internet).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I've seen college IT departments who encouraged sharing via local means. Why did they do it? Simple, the sharing would have gone on either locally or via P2P and they have plenty of internal local bandwidth, but bandwidth to the rest of the world is far more limited. Thus, by keeping to local sharing systems, the colleges external connection doesn't get bogged down by the endless P2P requests...
maybe im just in a bad mood, but that seems like a damn good idea. if they really need a computer for work, they can go to a lab or a library. if they want high speed internet in their dorm, they can call their local cable service provider and pay for it like every other american.
Another thing to remember that many students are now being charged for internet access and not allowed to have their own internet connectioned installed. Imagine you are 18 and have to attend uni clear accross the country, you may think that you could keep in touch with your friends, family and loved ones over the internet? but no you cant use IM, email or any internet in what will be your home for the next 3+ years.
So you may say why use the internet when the can use the phone or write. Sure they could do that but come on we are not in the dark ages. Most people I know comunicate over the internet more than over phone/snail mail. So as technology moves on and socicity takes up more and more, you would be isolating the students more and more. This should in my opinion be aginst basic human rights.
There are many other reasons why students would use the internet for non academic reasons that arnt against the law. So taking away such a resource just isnt an option.
On another point all together people should remember that the internet is what it is today due to Warez and porn. If these two things never existed we would only have a poor shadow of the internet that we all enjoy today.
"There are people (on this committee) willing to take action, and it'll probably go over the line in terms of privacy concerns," he (Conyers) said.
Would you mind letting me know which ones of my elected officials feels they can create unconstitutional laws? Please?
If what you are sending weren't in some way illegal, you would just stick it on a web page.
Yeah, because we all know a web server can handle any number of downloads just fine.
time and money spent on something you can not control would equal more money to spend on crap like intrusive advertising.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
Using Homeowners Associations as an example, you'd think congress would realize how much people hate neighbor against neighbor policies. When the chief enforcement comes from neighbor's tips and spying, a free society suffers. Let the police do their job and trust your neighbor.
Of course a Homeowners Associations primary focus is to keep land value up, and the Congress's (under direction from RIAA) goal is to keep CD prices...well I guess they are very similar.
we can't have the riff raff coming in...
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Oh, wait. Clinton signed that law. The NET Act is great!
Some people I know run ftp sites off their computers here. They used 3800$ worth of bandwidth since Christmas between the 2 of them.
The first one, the network admins actually caught, with logs and everything, and told him to stop.
The 2nd, the dumbass network admins thought was being used as a 'zombie' to packet other people's computers. They didn't even look at his packets to see what was going across.
Another interesting thing is they blocked Kazaa here, but not FTP or IRC. They also have a 'penalty box' where people who exceed the day's bandwidth allotment go. It makes your IP 50% packet loss unless you switch to another IP (we have DHCP, but you can still assign your own IP).
think for yourself. question authority.
Actually the Hindi crowd makes heavy use of ur u b 2 4 k simply so we can more easily identify and hate them.
He is doing you a favor - let him continue to use ur.
And I agree, Ed is a moron.
why don't we just put all the file-sharing university students in jail, where we can then force them to use their brains for our benefit for pennies on the dollar? yeesh... what is this? martial law for IP?
While the initial use of the term "piracy" may have made people think of hoisting the jolly roger and scourging the seven-seas.... nowadays it is much more likely to think of piracy in terms of copying (software, movies, songs, etc).
Saying somebody was robbed by pirates on the high sees, you might expect somebody to say "What did they do, take all his CD's and tapes?"
The toolbar comes up, but I was able to block the image.
Not a 100% solution, but it's something.
The "No Electronic Theft Act" sets the penalties way to high for committing a crime which is way too widespread. It's like here in New Jersey where tailgating carries with it a penalty of 5 points (the same as reckless driving), and as such cops are very hesitant to give out tickets for it. Lower the penalties to something reasonable, and you'll see Universities reporting the crime more often.
Okay replace the word "copyrighted" with "Freeware" then. It still doesn't change the fact that the chances of finding any freeware software, images or music is extrememly low.
I went on WinMX (a Windows file-sharing program that's probably better than Kazaa) and shared my GBA folder, containing an emulator (VisualBoyAdvance) and a few redistributable ROMs. People actually downloaded them.
Will I retire or break 10K?
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=sarcasm
Hey State U! We, Congress, Know you are underfunded and you're primarily a place for both the 'college' experience and education, but we want you to play cops for us now. Just use the money you don't have, lay off some professors, and cut back on classes. Lord forbid you cut back on sports or focus on education.
Hey, wait a sec, eliminate computers and you won't have to pay for them anymore. That'll give you enough money to begin draconian police practices on the student's computers!
It's not society which is concerned about enforcing these laws, it's big business.
Big business doesn't care about a student drinking beer, it doesn't affect them in a negetive way.
They do care about students copying music, because in their view it hurts the profit margins.
By now, everyone knows that it's not "the people" that run the country or set the rules, it's "the people with money."
We have a file sharing network set up only for users of the university. I'm sure that our admins know about it, since we use *so* much network traffic off peak. But since they no longer have to pay for all the external traffic that we used to use, they're turning a blind eye. :)
I'm sure the **AA hate this kind of thing, but the bottom line is that it's saving them money, and quite a bit of it, and keeping the students happy (of course the network is usually faster than the internet as well
editing html, and uploading files via ftp to the site.
Software analogous to blogging software could automate both of these tasks.
what's going to be more attractive: doing all of the above, or downloading a piece of p2p software from the web, hitting a button that says "share", and being done?
It's not always that easy because comparatively few Americans have always-on Internet access. When a person who connects to the Internet via a dial-up connection terminates the dial-up connection, the files that the person was sharing on a P2P network disappear from the P2P network unless somebody else who is connected to the Internet and is on the P2P network has downloaded those files and is sharing them.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yes. It's called privacy.q =privacy
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?
" I'm not sure why filesharing is any more of a problem on a university campus than, say, underage drinking or drug use."
Its not any worse, its not really a problem except that it affects serious money interests.
Love Stallman or hate him, but his rant on copyrights that he did a decade ago is so on the mark that its scary.
Copyrights as they exist today can't be enforced in a connected age unless the government places serious roadblocks to a free society.
A copyright or patent is a bargain between society and the creator. It is not an inherent right as many seem to think.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
It's simple. All ISP's should have the common carrier status. Afterall, an ISP only forwards packets and should imho not be held responsable for what their customers do. If I customer of mine downloads child pornography, I'm am not the one committing the crime. To me this looks like a clear case of "we can't get the end-users so we harass the ISP's". This is a higly undesirable situation and is imho no way legally enforcable.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
They're limited to 1.5gigs of incoming or outbound traffic a WEEK?? Where I go to school the answer we got from the ITS department was "if you're transfering more than 40gb a day you're going to get flagged"
The NRA is always talking about protecting people's rights, but they don't seem to give a shit about The Patriot Act or the DMCA. I wonder if they realise these things could affect gun rights.
-Derick
Universities could start some sort of new "Campus Police" department whose job it would be to uphold the laws.
used to protect the people who provided the network from this type of BS. See below for an explanation.
from Washington University's Online Daily...
""Common carrier" is a legal distinction applied to ubiquitous communications technologies like the telephone. "Common carrier" status offers legal protections to the providers of communication services. U S West cannot be sued if you use their phone lines and their pay phones to call in a bomb threat. Whatever nastiness goes across telephone lines is legally the responsibility of the people that originated the call, not the phone company that transmitted it. Since there is no issue of liability, the phone company is not put in the position of monitoring or regulating how their phones are used. "
LINK to Source
~Tetravus
Then you'll find out about this thing called "work".
Why? Because before, filesharing was filling the Internet pipe. It was awful. People sharing movies across a whole 20Mbps meant instant plateau the minute the university woke up at 8am every day. The solution was to simply cut off napster (this particular one managed to solve itself, as did eMesh). Once again I can browse the internet without insane response times. And the university doesn't have to pay for emergency bandwidth type things. We've since doubled the pipe size at no extra cost as a result of contract renegotiations, but I don't think its possible to know how much would be used in absence of filters or pipe limitations.
The only downside to this is a chilling effect. By shutting down access to file sharing programs, you cut access to all files reguardless of copyright and distrobution desires. Wanted to give your cool guitar solo piece to the world? Well you better have a nice hosting service set up when word gets around that it doesn't suck, because there's no avoiding flashcrowds anywhere but p2p.
The answer is something like encrypted gnutella. Then the man from oofle cannot filter on ip because there would be no central location, cannot filter on port because we're abusing a standard port and cannot filter by signature because the packets have been obscured at worst, encrypted at best.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Yes. Its is against the law to infringe copyrights.
But, so what?
It was illegal for blacks to sit in the front of the bus.
It's illegal to exceed the speed limit.
Its illegal to have a radar detector.
Its illegal to drink when you're twenty
In fact, in many states, its illegal to have oral sex. (crimes against god and nature).
So what?
The truth is at any given time, there are laws which are senseless because they protect some monied contituent. You probably have broken 10 laws in the last week alone.
Its pretty clear that a majority of the citizens of the world think copyright laws as they exist today are just another "SPEED LIMIT 55" signs.
Yeah. They're there. They're illegal. But so what.
I don't feel bad if every last RIAA member goes bankrupt. It won't bother me for 30 seconds if April Lavnigne (or whatever) never makes another record.
They simply are silly laws that everybody (well, except "perfect" you) ignores because they are silly laws.
Yes, I should contact my congressman to get the law changed, but I've got a life. I'll do what needs to get done and take care of the big things, and that's that.
I just don't care about your alleged use of P2P networks. I just don't care that people with something to lose are claiming copying a song is the equivalent of murder. I'm not going to fight, I'm going to ignore.
"As long as you have an open network, people are going to find ways to share files. Putting pressure on the University is just going to make life a lot more difficult for administration and for students."
Of course. Was anyone under the impression that violating copyright was going to bring a world of peace, love, and happiness? People naturaly want all the benefits of their actions without all the disadvantages. Sorry, reality doesn't work that way.
If we want a particular world, then we're going to have to take the hard road. That unfortunately means that as geeks were going to have to do something unprecedented. Use social skills, and ditch the rebel without a clue persona. Involve ourself in business and government. Understand both the spirit and the letter of our countries respective laws. Talk with both businessmen, and elected leaders about our concerns. Get the media involved. AND DITCH THE ILLEGAL ACTIVITY! No one's helped by talking out of both sides of our collective mouths.
And above all else, make certain your arguments are truely ironclad. Some of the arguments I've seen trotted out, justifying this or that is just lame. If you can't be bothered to put your best foot forward, then don't be surprised if you fall on your face.
That if I copy a CD and give it to my neighbor, I am not a person who kills and murders, nor am I the moral equivalent.
Its not even *theft*.
Its a coypright violation.
But when you use the correct language, it sounds not so bad. Almost pedestrian. So the *AA has mangled the language to make copyright infringment theft and murder.
And its not.
Now, you knew that, you were trolling. But in case you weren't, I wanted to smack you upside the head.
Is misconception. I mean on one hand you have people saying "but P2P has legal uses as well" then the other half saying "yeah but most of what it is really used for is illegal". And a bunch of other nonsense. To be perfectly honest, those that say "the vast majority of whats on P2P is illegal" are incorrect. You only hear about the stuff which is illegal but I know for a FACT that there are tons and tons of perfectly legal songs/movies/pictures/documents on the P2P networks I use most (FastTRAK and IRC primarily).
And then lets get into the bit about ownership. Just because I put a song up for sharing on P2P doesn't make it illegal. RIAA would like you to think that it does, but in fact it doesn't.
Case in point, I wanted to copy my old copy of Bush - Sixteen Stone to my Nomad to listen to en route to work yesterday. Guess what. MAJOR gash on the BACKside of the disc, two whole tracks are unuseable.
Now with the RIAA approved method of doing business they get $18 just for me regaining access to something I already own.
In the REAL world however, I just fired up Kazaa Lite and got my two tracks back for NOTHING, the way it should be.
Now even though those tracks were procured from a P2P service, there was absolutely nothing illegal about what I did.
You are confusing the term illegal.
Illegal would be me downloading Madonnas latest song from KL even though I would never be caught dead buying her CD (talk about illegal....why is she still pretending she can sing?).
But me downloading a copy of Bush - Glycerine when I already own the CD is NOT illegal.
The bottom line is this. Just because it's online and everyone has access to it doesn't make it illegal, me downloading it when I didn't purchase it IS. But since it would cut into their bottom line too much RIAA spins it to where most people believe hosting media online is automatically illegal.
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
Living in a dorm room myself as a non-traditional student, I can say that the university is not paying for the high speed internet access, rather the fees I pay to live in the dorm are. It is not even the university system, it is separately run by an outside organization. Besides, if I moved off campus, at least here (Mankato, MN), most the surrounding appartments have high speed internet access as a feature to attract students.
The referenced Jenkins quote (which is clearly yanked so far out of context that one can only guess as to his meaning, but..) appears to be saying NOT that this is a great policy, but rather that it's damned *stupid*. IOW, it looks to me like Jenkins is saying "if it's a crime, let law enforcement deal with it. It's not the business of the university."
That quote, AFAICT, was being used in contrast to the other quote, to wit:
"While I'm sympathetic to the young people, they're breaking the law," warned Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. "Until the university or this committee is going to do something about it, we're wasting everyone's time."
So Waters does indeed appear to be in support of universities becoming the P2P Police.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Actually, there are cases before the courts (in Canada anyway) that are challenging this. If a person gets into an acident when drinking and driving, it is being argued that the place that provided the drinks is at fault. That is, it becomes the responsibility of the bar, the restaurant, the host of a private party, whatever, to take away your keys.
In Ontario, Canada, it's the law. Party hosts, and licensed bars and restaurants are held legally responsible for monitoring exactly how much alcohol is served to patrons/guests. You're not allowed to let anyone get drunk, and if the guy gets out and kills someone, it's on you, the host or the owner of the restaurant/bar that served the last drink.
Several licensing suspensions and law suits have come up which point out just how goofy this law is.
In one case 3 years ago, a fellow got drunk, the bartender took away his keys, and got him a taxi to take him home (at the bar's expense). When this moron got home, he grabbed his spare set, came back, and tried to drive his car home. Took out a family on the way. Moron got off with a year's license suspension, and the bar got their liquor license revoked, and was fined. Apparently, the judge found that the bar was more responsible for it than the patron was.
The same law applies to bars, restaurants, AND hosts of private parties. I guess this means that you should have some handcuffs on hand to lock up your guests for the night as taking their keys and calling a cab isn't enough anymore.
Thought crime is being defined as we watch. Witness this horror:
Members of the House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees copyright law said at a hearing that peer-to-peer piracy was a crime under a 1997 federal law, but universities continued to treat file-swapping as a minor infraction of campus disciplinary codes.
"If on your campus you had an assault and battery or a murder, you'd go down to the district attorney's office and deal with it that way," said Rep. William Jenkins, R-Tenn.
Yes, Mr. Jenkins really compared sharing music to murder as moral equivalents requiring similar responses. This is a large step above the usual loaded language of "piracy". Equating the two actions morally represents the destruction of morals and replaces them with laws guided by self interest rather than moral sense. The punishments are equivalent too. The average murder or rape conviction gets you five year in jail. Violating the oxymoronically named NET act will get you five yars as well. That is the essence of thoughtcrime. Orwel's nightmare society had no laws, as all that was demanded was strict obedience in word, thought and deed. The punishment for violating the one law in any way was, of course, the same. This is very distrubing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
All that needs to happen is a ipsec kit that is interoperable, need to be released with the p2p sotfware. that would prevent the man in the middle snooping.....
Iowa State University, which when I lived in the dorms had over 1Terrabyte of searchable shares, recently had a crackdown and had some of the top sharers' equipment seized. Maybe this is going to be the trend in large universities? I remember some other universities getting hit a little over a year ago.
What are you a kindergarden teacher??? Let me guess, if you were governor of your state, you would execute random people from time to time, until the murder rate became very small. Then again, the murder rate would never be very small, because you'd be murdering tonnes of people!
This mentality doesn't work at all. For one thing, most criminals won't care if other people get inconvenienced, punished, or killed. They won't stop what they're doing because they don't care about anyone else. They think they have the "right" to do anything they want. And another, punishing innocent people and taking away everyone's rights is a crime. P2P filesharing is the modern day equivalent of the press, and making it effectively illegal is "abridging the freedom of speech," and "of the press." Not only that, many won't see the point in following the law because they will end up being punished no matter what they do.
The United States has become completely fucked up, not only because innocent people are flagrantly punished for others' crimes (such as this case), but because criminals are assisted by the "justice" system--such as the unchecked patent system allowing extortion on massive scales, people who are able to make a living by frivolous lawsuits, and so on. In fact, Our economy is no longer a free market, it is a theif market: where "sellers" abuse the system to con, steal, and lock everyone else out of the market.
In fact, if you look at it, this case is about the {RI,MP}AA abusing the system to lock people out of being able to distribute information. The {RI,MP}AA tries to claim they have a "right" to be a monopoly for distribution of any sort of information--music, movies, news, &etc. The whole assumption of their statements are that anything produced is their property, and no one else can claim any copyrights, because according to them, no one else is able to produce any music, movies, and so on. Music didn't exist before the RIAA? If someone records a kid's birthday with a camcorder, that person is copying a movie??? It's all bullshit.
"The historical definition of the word 'piracy' is synonymous with looting, killing and raping. Unathorized copying bears no resemblence to these heinous acts and as such it is unfortunate that many have adopted this word to describe it."
You likewise assume much. For a country that before 9/11 didn't even know how to spell Afghanistan, or know were Iraq is on a map. To think that the general public knows the "historical" definition of piracy, when we can't even get ours straight, is stretching things. Geeks may know, but then that's not the group you need to worry about, now is it?
I ran a quick Google on "speed limit death statistics"--yep, I can back that up. Nice summary from an activist in NM:
But I admit I couldn't find pages proving my real contention--that speeders kill more folks than kids swapping mp3s.Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
The logic doesn't follow, the university provides the internet so they should become monitors for copyright violation?
Using that same logic a car dealership will be held responsible if a customer violates traffic regulations?
You have to feel for the RIAA and MPAA, you really do, searching for scapegoats and pointing their fat fingers at the world that has passed them by.
When I do hear of the RIAA (espcecially) I think of the 1930s, as that is where they are in terms of business sense.
The encryped gnutella you're looking for is available at http://freenet.sourceforge.net/tiki-index.php Everything is encrypted. Every node is a router. Spoofing is part of the protocol to give you plausable deniablity. It's beautiful.
When VPNs are outlawed, only outlaws have VPNs.
...is that nothing has *ever* been stolen by p2p, because everything is copied. So the 95% would be trading *copies* of radios and TV's from the local stereo shop. Copyright infringement is against the law but its not stealing.
Why don't the *AA's and the Universities get together? Universities are the one place where internet-based media would work and be extremely profitable! They're the one type of group that it could actually work at. You have the network, the computers, the users, and most importantly the ability to work with lots of payment options as the group is also physically close together. Universities already provide phone and cable services. They have lots of ways to get the $$$ from the students-cash, check, or charge...
I'm sure the schools would be more responsive if they stopped threatening and gave some real options! They might be more willing to help and let you use their network for a cut of the take of course!
minor violation of petty copyright
not conforming to PC laws and directorates
What will get you a wrist slap... maybe:
Murder
Cop killing
Purjury
Obstruction of justice
Abuse of power
misappropriation of tax dollars
Being a high ranking official and using that to sell out your country for money (note: you must be high up thus increasing the damage done but giving you benefit of having connections)
At my university, they claim to have no problem with students sharing files, and have said that until they are served nothing will be done to stop it off of university pipes.
On the other hand, they are actively trying to stop P2P sharing under the guise of "bandwidth conservation" but AFAIK this is only being inforced in the communal (ITS) labs and not in the dorms (or even the dorm labs for that matter)
But our IT department has a hell of a lot more problems than just P2P and bandwidth, but they refuse to those of use who "work in the trenches"
Later
Josh
If you can't stop everyone from smoking weed, snorting coke, and dropping E, you can't stop MP3 sharing (and U.S. spends BILLIONS trying to stop those drugs).
... that they are surrounded by nothing but thieves, murderers, and terrorists! And that nothing but more and more laws and government prosecution can make them safe to carry out their Constitutionally guaranteed right to support and protect the megacorps that make all good things possible! I think that all of you folks whining here must want the terrorists to win. You must all be pirates, at least. Off to Guantanimo with the lot of you!
Love, Peace, and Linux-based surveillance programs,
Uncle John A.
That is all.
It seems to me that universities are not in a position to determine all by themselves exactly what consitutes "illegal" sharing. The universities may very well have self-authorized enforcement rights over their own AUP, as they truly do own the campus network. Such an AUP might reasonably restrict P2P (mostly due to resource consumption), but that's a far cry from notifying law enforcement and/or the gods of copyright.
I used to work in higher ed. If I was dealing with this issue today, I would include resource-wasting language in the AUP, naming P2P as an example. But tossing the resource squanderers would be as far as it goes until there are court orders, warrants, and/or subpeonas that specify precisely what to do and to whom. Appeasement of the copyright industry means the students all get pro bono lawyers from ACLU, and the universities get buried in lawsuits as well as a boatload of bad press. Higher education is the same as any other industry: take care of your customer or someone else will. RIAA is not a customer, so they are to be handled as a nuisance -- bare minimum legal cooperation.
Universities (or other network owners for that matter) are in no position to determine the copyright validity of every file fragment in transit across their network. No one really is, which is why the music industry must adapt or die.
"the vast majority of, and I mean vast, files on p2p are illegal"
No. Let me say that again: NO, NO, NO!
This is exactly the kind of assumption that twists truth and reality on its head. Where to begin?
First, the files themself are *NOT* illegal. I have every damn right in the world to make fair-use copies of a music CD, video or DVD. SO the act of copying it is *NOT* illegal, and in my opinion it never should be!
Second, it is not illegal for me to post it on a network. However, it is illegal for others to steal it when I post it. I could simply be posting the file so that I can access it at another location.
The problem with these arguments is they assume fair use does not exist, and they blame someone for others actions.
My university (in Germany) recently gets more and more similarly worded mails. The people who get them here just forward them to those responsible for the IP range where the alleged perpetrator sits, and they do not reply to the MPAA as requested in the mails, but the amount of mails they get starts to annoy them. So this kind of works, unfortunately.
;-)
They have also started to do some traffic shaping and port blocking in order to reduce bandwidth. However, they are just looking into this, some US universities seem to do a lot more already.
One of the mails I could look into contained the following phrases: The distribution of unauthorized copies of copyrighted motion pictures constitutes copyright infringement under the Copyright Act, Title 17 United States Code Section 106(3). This conduct may also violate the laws of other countries, international law, and/or treaty obligations. So, because we're not part of the USA, they basically say that the file sharing may or may not be against the law.
As far as I know, uploading copyrighted material is illegal here. But they try to threaten as many people as possible with as little effort as is sufficient.
In what way does sharing copyrighted material differ from going to a swapmeet and picking up a used couch?
How is it different from bartering goods and services?
Is it different, fundamentally, from trading used CDs with your friends? Swapping baseball cards? Does digitized reproducibility fundamentally change the nature of what it is you think you are buying?
In other words, are people not able to get their heads around the idea of buying a license and not the physical thing which is theirs to play with as they choose?
Software providers and now music and film companies (software providers by another name) think of your purchases as a licensed service. Of course, restaurants also try to charge you for sharing your meal with your dinner partner.
Can, or should these companies prevail in their attempts to control a product they no longer physically possess by erecting a thicket of laws and electronic countermeasures?
Is treating your customers like crooks a viable business model?
Discuss.
Of course, I'd like to believe that members of Congress actually do know better, and that they're simply being used as puppets by big corporations. On second thought, that's just as scary as believing that they're clueless idiots. I have more faith in the FBI, who know better than to chase after copyright infringers when there are domestic terrorists to hunt down, regardless of how many redundant copyright laws Congress passes. (Not that I think there are that many terrorists, but as long as the FBI is chasing them and not me, it's in my best interest to convince them otherwise.)
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Dear Dean,
It has recently come to my attention that amongst certain students that attend your university certain unethical and illegal acts are being perpetuated on university campus. Underage drinking, drug abuse, and violence threaten to undermine the media cartels who market them for entertainment value to our youth. Therefore I'm so sorry to ask you to do what years of our nation's finest have not been able to - stop these criminal activities in our youth. As of November you are hereby required to find some means of monitoring and logging the activities of the free citizens that are your students on the notion that since some large portion of them are engaged in the drug traffic trade or are at least practicing rape or alchoholism- so says the study funded by the lobbyists that brought this to my attention. It is up to you to place sufficient invasions of privacy that these activities cease! Unless some measurable progress (at least 4 high profile arrests that I can show on CNN) is made by November, the committee and I will have no option but to recall all or some of the federal grants that allow you to educate our youth.
Thank you,
Your Congressman
Putting aside the legal and moral implications of this, my question is: how is a university supposed to know which material is infringing, and which isn't?
As much as the entertainment industries hate it, file sharing (whether via P2P, http, ftp, or whatever) isn't (and shouldn't be) illegal. Sharing files that you don't have rights to is illegal, but there's nothing wrong with sharing files to which you own the copyright, or have the permission of the copyright holder.
So, how exactly are the schools supposed to know which files the students have rights to, and which they don't? Are they expecting the schools to monitor every file, find they copyright holder, and ask them if the file is legal or not?
This is just absurd.
So, people are copying things left and right, breaking the law in the process. Of course the law is only valid so much as the general population supports it. Maybe if this many people are breaking this law or set of laws, they need to be rethought. It's like democracy or something...imagine that!
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, Universities are for education!
It will help you understand the situation.
Speed limits will not be obeyed unless they are set properly.
In other news, the Dept of Transportation are not doing enough to stop the flow of illegal goods traveling in vehicles over roads they maintain.
Also, the phone company is not doing enough to stop illegal credit card fraud which happens when someone uses a stolen credit card to place a phone order.
"North Korea on the other hand actually has the weapons and the motivation to do something nasty."
Except there's a US army on the south and 5 billion fucking chinese to the north who think you're doing them a favor if you kill 1 billion of them.
China is a country that should frigten any sane person and China won't put up with nukes from a pissant to the south.
Plus, N Korea isn't hosting terrorists and selling them weapons.
They already have campus police, this could be another one of their functions, not that of the admin. Coleges police their campus already, I do not see how it is any different.
Here's actual training:
Put trainees in room.
Have them drop pants.
Make sure both hands are free.
Turn off lights.
Instruct trainees to find ass using both hands.
Trainees may need repeated instruction to help them with this difficult task.
If Trainee finds it first time, they are Associate Professor material.
first off lets all setup P2P servers of totaly free content.
i am sure that we could help sourceforge by setting up a p2p mirroring system. with this my on campus data trasfers would be great and I could have all the free data I want
This idea was congered up amongst my friends at school.
It's amazing how many people you could be friends with if only they'd make the first approach.
Devil's advocate. Society doesn't have an "inherent right" either. The only defining quality that a society, has over an individual is one of numbers, and by extension the "rights" that force brings.
What the hell is going through congress' minds? Money. Specifically, what they should support based on who is giving them the most money. The US is not a democracy.
Barto
The answer is as simple as checking out Mediaforce's chilling, Orwell-meets-NetNanny site ("Copyright protection made SO SIMPLE, all you see are RESULTS!")
Check out this short list of their 'services'...
SOLUTIONS
The company offers solutions to address a full range of client needs:
Monitoring & Reporting Solutions: Our clients leverage our best-of-breed technology to monitor infringement trends and compliance.
DCMA [sic] Compliance Solutions: Using MediaForce's fully automated processes, our clients leverage the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to protect their copyrighted material. MediaForce manages the notice, takedown, and counterclaim processes, which often prove burdensome to copyright holders.
Exchange Solutions: Using our relationships with industry media partners, we offer services which permit holders of pirated works to exchange them for licensed copies of the original recordings.
Piracy Decoy Services: Building on our unique visibility into peer-to-peer file exchanges, we offer solutions which minimize the distribution of pirated works across the Internet.
Oh, I especially love their use of the word 'solution'. One would think a 'solution' was something that fixes things, right? Except when a 'solution' consists of deliberately corrupting files, injecting handmade P2P virii into the networks, and of course.. don't forget those lovely automated attack-lawyer spams - "fully automated processes" which "leverage the DMCA".
I'd write more, but frankly, if I click any more of their links, I think I may vomit on my keyboard, and that shit's hard to clean off.
Should pedestrians enforce road speed limits now by jumping in front of speeding cars now?
It's your law, get your police who are paid to enforce the law to enforce it.
In the framework of our(USA) current laws, certain filesharing is illegal.
:-)
Other filesharing, like a fast C++ implementation of Simpson's Rule from calculus that I might have written, is very legal.
So, given that there is NO arbirtrary free filesharing that is legal, certain restrictions must be applied to limit filesharing to a point where it becomes non-existant or legal.
These can take different forms: throttling bandwidth, making broadband connections expensive, keeping a eagle on users, locking down the systems to prevent any software installation, etc.
On a moral basis...
Copyrights were implemented to help inventors make a profit from their inventions(I might be mistaken there), and to encourage people to invent.
What is, is an abuse of copyright laws by corporations who aim to make as much money as possible; without regard for ethics of sellers.
Now, people have a chance to get free music, so they get it- illegal or not.
Random thought:
Humans are absolutly worthless...
You can`t really sell them, you can`t really buy them.
Here's my thoughts to what SHOULD be:
Commodities that are sold should not be traded for free.
The sellers should put reasonable prices on things that are monetarily valuable- like food, a CD, etc; and buyers should pay reasonable prices for them, without stealing. P2P filesharing along the style of Napster would take place for things that aren`t worth selling or are offered for free.
Utopia, anyone? *grin*
Quite frankly and in the present...
I don`t mind people dling a few illgal files every now and then.
Its when things like movies, games or whole CDs get tossed around routinly that I dislike it.
Its in terms of magnitude to me-
Some illegal things are bigger than other illegal things.
In this situation, $$ is a determiner of magnitude of illegality(unfortantly).
Let's not get into the morality of buying and selling here, please.
A large group of people don`t try before they buy, they just try, and don`t bother buying.
In terms of market economics, that says:
A block of people will copy the commodity and use it, and not pay us for the time+effort we spend making it. That reduces our profit.
It is the same as stealing, but instead of there only being an upcopyable object being passed around, its a copyable object that propagates.
sorry about the long post, but I wabted to make some points precisly.
/b
|f(x)dx = F(b) - F(a)