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University of Utah Promises DMCA Crackdown
Milo Fungus writes "The University of Utah announced yesterday to all students, faculty, and staff that "the University will disable network access for any machine for which a DMCA complaint has been received" from the MPAA, RIAA, or member of the software industry. The full text of the memorandum can be found here. (Please be easy on the server and set up a mirror if you can.)"
In theory you're right, but in reality the RIAA most likely does have reliable information that the accused actually did illegally share files. The question is where we go from here: Does the filesharing stop? Is everyone going to be thankful for the university's foresight which protects the students from real legal problems? Are students going to see the RIAA as a well-meaning organization which protects the rights of starving artists? I doubt it. The problem that is going to be fixed is the identifiability and therefore accountability of the sender in p2p networks.
Our IT department noticed that our machine was originating a very large volume of outgoing traffic. They ran NMAP, and saw
and said "Oh, they're running Gnutella." They pulled our plug, without even bothering to try and contact the machine's administrator or the club's advisor first.
This is not a joke, they really did.
It turned out that someone was legitimately downloading a legitimate copy of the non-commercial QNX iso from our legitimate public FTP site.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
I thought that the DMCA allowed a counter-notification to be sent to restore service, and that ignoring a counter-notification was illegal. Is this university really willing to violate the DMCA by ignoring counter-notifications? If so, they are opening themselves up to some very large lawsuits under the DMCA.
Well, there are some p2p systems which do the sort of things you mentioned. Most people don't know about them because off all the hype which says P2P is only for "free" movies and music--much of the hype is spread by the MPAA and RIAA themselves.
Off the top of my head, The Circle had an IRC like chatting system, a group messaging system (kind of like Usenet, kind of not--could distribute blogs with it), and last time I checked, they were working on a system which works with apt-get to distribute Debian packages via The Circle. I'm sure there are other systems like it, but probably not many. Read below for the reason.
I think the situation consists more of people who have been chased out of using the protocol. Who would want to use (or create) a system if there is significant risk of being sued / attacked because of what others do on it, or because an organization has delcared war on this type of system? Then you are only left with people who want to use it for illegal purposes.
Well, there is *some* flexibility in the law. The material has to be taken down "expeditiously". At my university, we notify the computer owner and give them a chance to respond before shutting them off. Most of the time they don't even know they're sharing files - when they find out, they delete them and that's that. No interruption of service necessary.
One thing that sucks about this guilty-until-proven-innocent law (from a reluctant enforcer's perspective) is that an overwhelming majority of the time (more than 99%, really) the complaint is valid. Makes it harder to work up the righteous indignance the DMCA deserves.