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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?"
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
Yes it is inefficent to use P2P, but if you don't have a web/ftp server running then it becomes much easier just to load up a P2P client.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Not necessarily. Consider etree, for instance. Etree specializes in trading live music from trade-friendly bands such as the Grateful Dead and its sucessors, Phish, etc. However, etree trades involve lossless formats such as FLAC or Shorten, which take far more bandwidth than MP3 or Ogg Vorbis.
FTP and Web servers serving these files tend to be overloaded, so a peer-to-peer solution such as BitTorrent can be very handy for such trading.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
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
At the end of the day if people can get away with it they will some one must enforce the law - you have two choices:
1) Do it in house
2) Have the government/police do it for you
Actually there is a third...change the stupid law that people find so repugnant that they choose to ignore it.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
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
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.
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
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 $60. All of those purchases were made my freshman year, when I thought my money would go far. It is also worth noting that I downloaded the MP3s from two out of the three CDs before I made the purchase. Since then, I haven't had money to purchase these items, and I don't think that my filesharing would do anything to discourage me from purchasing CDs, because I don't have the money to make the purchases in the first place.
In the long run, we're all dead.
The point is that a packeteer can't look inside of encrypted packets, which is what all the p2p traffic that everyone is trying to manage will soon be.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
Some people I know run ftp sites off their computers here. They used 3800$ 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.
Kinda like how the english language has so many rules and the general public is lazy and apathetic about them.
College studen get's 5 years
I'll give you the t for free, but what's that apostrophe there for? I mean that's not even a plural, it's mearly a verb conjugation.
99.997% of the american public could care less.
Exactly how much less could they care? I think you mean they couldn't care less. Do you actually think about the words you use?
while the same group had a 95% of not knowing WHAT the current laws even were.
This is a sentence fragment. I think you wanted to have a comma before it instead of a period.
some college punk kid who's life
The posessive form of "who" is "whose."
I'll just ignore your elipsis with two and four dots in them...
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
Actually, yes. In situations where being able to report criminals is feasable, failing to do so is also a crime. This is completely in line with the premise of being legally obligated to report a crime if you witness one (5th ammendment rights not withstanding).
All the Universities have to do is show the infeasability of trying to do that. They might begin by showing a) the quantity of data that passes through their networks daily; b) that all internet packets, regardless of content, are just streams of zeros and ones - it is the source and destination computers that treat those packets differently; and c) considering that even when you connect to a web server, that server is sharing its data with you, you cannot block access to all forms of peer to peer sharing without disabling web access completely.
Of course, these are just beginning arguments that I can come up with as quickly as I type this. There are probably at least two dozen more.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
Pursuant to 18 USC 4, misprison of a felony is defined as follows:
"Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civic or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 3 years or both."
But this is offtopic, so please direct future responses about this to my (spam-blocked) email address.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'