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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.
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.
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?
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)
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 ----
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.
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...)
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.
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...
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!
Recently there was a story about spammers using students as relays. If it was up to me, I'd say that the university administrators should spend time hunting the spammers.
The biggest problem, from the perspective of law, is that no one but very few people care about illegal filesharing. If I start sharing files illegally from my home computer, it's not like anyone would care (with the exception of a few companies the media giants fund). If I started sending spam, I'd be having hard time trying to keep my connection to the net because there are people who would immediately try to trace and report my actions. Illegal filesharing is not frowned upon like most other crimes are. That's a fundamental problem that all the anti-p2p measures have failed to address. If they are serious about fighting illegal filesharing, they need to get the support of netizens and so far "they" have done nothing but stomp on our rights and values.
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!
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?
Well, my college only had a statement that basically said "don't commit fraud or hack anything using our resources".
However, having a policy against something is not at all related to actively monitoring it. If you rent an apartment from me and the lease says "no dragging a keg inside and trashing the place", surely you'll agree that it's not my job (nor should it be) to install video cameras in the living room just to be sure. The same thing is true here: they can tell you not to share copyrighted files, but that shouldn't imply a responsibility to go through your shared files and determine which are copyright violations.
Which is not to say it won't be their responsibility by the time the lawyers are done with them...
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.
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...
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
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?
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!
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
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.
" 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
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
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."
Money is societies accounting system. When it is applied honestly and fairly, then the citizenry have a duty to respect it. When it is abused as an instrument of coercion and tyranny, then they are right to reject it as a *moral* authority.
If the accounts are honest and fair, then people are more likely to respect them. If they don't respect them, but merely fear enforcement, then they will violate them freely whenever they feel they won't be punished.
But fair accounts would reward people approximately equally for equal effort. This is not to the advantage of those who have modified the system to reward themselves excessively. So as opposed to enhancing the fairness, and hence the moral authority of the system, they choose to enhance the threat level of the system. (This is made the more likely as those who would be immoral enough to corrupt the system in the first place are less likely to attribute moral behavior to anyone else.)
There are other effects, but when you accuse the mass of society of immoral behavior, then either you have a silly definition, or the system is not seen as fair.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.