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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?"
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.
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.
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
the problem with that is the utter laziness and apathy in the general american public.
College studen get's 5 years in a federal prison for violating a copyright. 99.997% of the american public could care less. It's the reverse NIMBY... or it wasn't in my back yard so why should I care.
The local University here took a poll of 1000 people for a project.. and over 78% did not care about copyrights and though that current laws were good. while the same group had a 95% of not knowing WHAT the current laws even were. (First question asked, and then second question asked.)
Hell if people cant be bothered to learn about basic laws that affect their day to day lives, you cant expect them to care at all about some college punk kid who's life is getting completely ruined for no reason what-so-ever.
welcome to america.. we have so many laws we can put you in prison for a long time for any reason we want.... but if you want to get off light.. kill or rape someone... those are our lower crimes.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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?
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.
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
The people sending these notices have no idea whether the files are there on your student's system or not.
How do I know? I'm a security technician / systems admin for a research institution. We don't have many people trying to use bootleg file sharing programs -- and our networks guys block some of the more common ones. We still get these notices from MPAA and BSA claiming that we have everything from movies to office software up for download on KaZaA.
No, that's not the funny part. The funny part is that the IP addresses given in these threats, 80% of the time, are IP addresses that do not have computers on them ... and never have. We have a few subnets still reserved for future expansion, never been used ... and these are where the copyright terrorists claim we have bootleg files. (The other 20% of the time, the addresses exist, but they still don't have any files on them.)
As far as I can tell, somewhere out there is a glitch in a KaZaA implementation that is listing our disused addresses as hot places to get movies ... and the terrorists are believing it, without even checking. That's right. They don't download the file from your student's system and then send the threat. They see a link to that system, do nothing whatsoever to verify it, and send the terrorist threat.
And as far as I'm concerned, that's exactly what it is: a terrorist threat, a threat of harm (specifically, abuse of the legal system, spurious prosecution), by a non-governmental group, in order to scare people into going along with a radical political movement.
If you bust your students, the terrorists have already won.
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!
As bad as the position is (I think it's repugnant), it's become fully legal (no case of it, afaik, has been overturned, despite several challenges). The first example of this, that I can think of, was the 1980's, when the Congress made continued receipt of Interstate highway funds contingent on raising the drinking age to 21 (it was this that finally forced the last few holdouts (like New York, Vermont, etc.) to raise their ages).
The justness of a law hangs on a lot more than enforcability.
I'm not sure I agree. Please give an example of a just law that can only be enforced if people squeal on one another. For example, murder, would not qualify, because its enforcement does not rely on the fact that someone must report "I saw John kill Mary." But anything that you do in the privacy of your home that does not produce a victim would pretty much fit the unjust laws we're talking about. The only means of enforcement is to invade my privacy.
They'll get the ISP to enforce it, so I'll just start encrypting my filesharing. Etc. It will just escalate. It will ultimately depend on one party reporting that they observed another party doing it. Like photocopying from a library book for a report to get you thrown in the slammer.
The justness of a law hangs on a lot more than enforcability.
I don't agree. The enforcability hangs on the justness. Any just law can be enforced. Many unjust laws can be enforced. But there are, IMHO, my whole argument here, NO just laws that cannot be enforced.
We're going to make it illegal to have oral sex in your own bedroom. To protect public morality, of course. How can such a law be enforced?
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
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.