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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)
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...)
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.
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
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!
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?
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
What? Merely a "federal crime", and not an act of terrorism yet?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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...
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
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!
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
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
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.
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!
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.
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
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
That's nothing. If you limit yourself to the electronic world, you miss the big picture. At my university (Western) we have several entire buildings dedicated to the sharing of copyrighted materials. Shelves and shelves of the stuff. I've got some right now... I'm going to enjoy it fully for three weeks, maybe more, then I'm gonna take it back when I no longer want it. Am I gonna pay for this? No way!
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.
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
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.