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Educating Users/Students on Reducing Exposure to the RIAA
An anonymous reader asks: "I work for a medium-sized university (25K students), and have been asked to come up with ideas on how to reduce our exposure to the RIAA. Our head of IT gets 50 to 100 emails from the RIAA every week, complaining about IP addresses where P2P applications offer copyrighted songs for download. We don't want to firewall off P2P applications completely, we just want to get the RIAA off our backs. How do other university IT departments educate students to stop attracting the RIAA's attention? Thanks for any war stories you might be able to share !"
Ok, try that and get back to me. I wanna see how this pans out.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
At my university, they posted signs in all the dorms explaining how to turn off uploading in Kazaa, and put up a web page with a list of common P2P apps and how to disable sharing. This was mostly done to address an upstream bandwidth problem, but I would imagine it would have the result you want as well.
My server
" We don't want to firewall off P2P applications completely, we just want to get the RIAA off our backs."
Find out who the ISP(s?) is(are?) for the RIAA and block them with the firewall.
(Yeah, I know it won't work, but man that'd sure feel good.)
"Derp de derp."
>50 to 100 emails from the RIAA every week
Surely getting this much unsolicited mail from a single source is tantamount to spam. If it's all from the same sender, or if the content is more-or-less identical, then it should be fairly trivial to block it.
This can be a tady risky, but explain to the users how they set up a local p2p network, sharing their stuff across campus, but not to the world. With hundreds, if not thousands, of students - there would be more than enough material to satisfy everyone. Some people would always get their hands on 'new stuff' that could be posted to the internal p2p network.
;)
It has worked at other universities, companies, and so forth. I'm sure it'll work for you too -- but be aware that it needs to keep a low profile as in "everybody knows, but nobody is responsible"
1. Keep claiming that your network is being hacked.
2. Bounce the emails from RIAA.
3. Send them pictures of big signs in your labs with the heading "Copyright Warning".
4. Pretend that you don't know what P2P is and so keep asking them questions.
5. Claim that their emails contain virii.
6. Agree to "help" them survey the extend of the problem for 6 months then claim that after 6 months you have new staff and no one knew about that survey.
7. Claim that you have a lot of students researching the murky world of P2P.
8. Firewall of the common P2P ports during office hours.
9. Explain to the RIAA that you are forced to use Windows and can't lock down the machines/network as you like.
10. Register you entire domain in some pacific island country and have a funky country code.
11. Tell them to get stuffed!
ok, why the hell dont you want to cut it?
well, may be you should just cut the p2p connection to the internet anyway, if you dont share to the world riaa wont bother you...
so you got annoying emails from riaa?! just apply a judge request about spamming, no, better register their email to watchmybigtits.com -- after all we hate them, but they're just humans... (and i prefer them looking to my sister's tits than in my cd library)
and even better, tell your students how to use irc and ftp, that's HOW one should trade files!
pussies!
-- search the web
I would assume that as a university, you function as a mini-ISP to the students who pay for it by way of computing fees and tuition. Since the P2P companies can no longer be held liable for the clients content, and the courts have ruled against Verizon as far as providing assistance in identifing certain copy right violators, simply call the RIAA's bluff. Tell them to leave you alone, unless they plan on filing suit against the individuals and require they get a court order for the information.
Someone hates these cans.
Why not just forward the message to the student, and tell the RIAA (with a form letter) you've informed them of the complaint, but that you consider yourself a common carrier and that you'll take no action on behalf of the RIAA.
:-)
Seems a fair way to do it to me. Anything else might be underhanded, and would make more work for you.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
uh, that's gayish; you seem a little bit too eager to bend over for the RIAA.
Drugs have taught an entire generation of American children the metric system.
For example, you could use the Evil Bit in TCP/IP packet headers. Non-evil, non-malicious programs should ignore any traffic marked with the evil bit. This protects those devices. If the RIAA is circumventing this protection bit (by ignoring it), you can slap them with a DMCA lawsuit.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
somebody please take RIAA out to a dark corner of the forest and dig a deep hole, cock your glock...
IANAL, but I doubt that'll stand up. ISPs aren't legally common carriers, you can't consider yourself one and magically make it so.
Help us build a better map!
maybe people should stand up and let it be known that we don't think the existence of laws that make a perversion of economics contribues to a free socety or a working market economy.
the reality of the p2p black market in music is that the cost of the "music" product is artificailly inflated to hundreds of times the real market value because of the (now eliminated) historical distribution controls in tapes/cd/etc. the cost disparity between the selling price and the market price both CREATED and MAINTAINS the black market. it's not rocket science here folks.
the ridiculousness of current copyright laws and the teeth of the DMCA are the only thing maintaining the profits by which these people harass everyone else. why should we have special laws to maintain an industry that is now NO LONGER NECCESARY?
in short, simply tell RIAA and thier "industry" to fuck off and die like any normal, non-innovating dinosaur industry should. stand up & flip the bird. I'm still am waiting to get a CnD from them.
- The name, address, and electronic signature of the complaining party [512(c)(3)(A)(i)]
- The infringing materials and their Internet location [512(c)(3)(A)(ii-iii)]
- Sufficient information to identify the copyrighted works [512(c)(3)(A)(iv)]
- A statement by the owner that it has a good faith belief that there is no legal basis for the use of the materials complained of [512(c)(3)(A)(v)]
- A statement of the accuracy of the notice and, under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on the behalf of the owner. [512(c)(3)(A)(vi)]
It may well be that the letters are not fully compliant. Usually they don't sign these because the complainant isn't the RIAA. See what happens if you respond asking for a compliant letter.It may be that they do include a signature, in which case you're up the creek. Also it is essential that you are compliant with te provisions since two can play at that game.
It's very unlikely that defending against a student caught copying music would have any chance of winning. That's what this whole story is about - avoiding insane laws. Here the request is to herd students into not breaking insane laws. The students know it's wrong but they do it anyway. They need some kind of reminder, and it doesn't need to be harsh. They have the information, and they're doing it anyway. They're not being reasonable, and they're hoping they don't get caught. It may not be feral, but it's childish. I hate the RIAA as much as the next guy, because they're not defending their rights, they're trying to gain ground into what people were able to do. But these people need a good scare.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Unless RIAA can prove that the students do not have the original CDs (by raiding the students' dorms with a warrant, perhaps), I don't see why the RIAA should blatantly assume that the students are doing something illegal.
The university can create a private P2P network where only the students can have access rights. If the RIAA tries to access this private network, take them to court for breaching the university's security.
Let me get this straight. Your students are using your network to commit a crime. (My point here has nothing to do with whether it should be illegal, the point is, it IS illegal.) As an administrator and employee for your univiersity, you are now going around asking people how to help your students commit the crime without getting caught. I just have one question: does your employees realize they have a walking, talking big-ass-lawsuit magnet working for them? If you worked for me, my only hope to mitigate the damage to the university is to be able to say (during discovery) that I fired your ass the second I heard about it, and called every other employee in and told them why I fired you and made it clear, in writing, anyone else tries to pull the same stupid stunt they will be the next to join the unemployent lines.
> Yay lets all encourage leaching... If your are going to download you should cotribute somthing to the network.
You could, of course, continue sharing all the things you own the copyright for and are giving away out of generosity. You aren't being a leech on society by only using other people's content all the time and never producing anything of your own, right?
If you want to stop RIAA intervention...good luck. At our university, there is an internal sharing hub set up (blocks outside IPs), but people still manage to get caught, for better or for worse.
I've been pushing FreeNet a lot lately, since it is starting to become a useful P2P application that is so secure, it is impossible to trace the origin and destination of all content. If students were set up several large nodes, and then maintain a set of Freenet-internal content catalogs (or use the companion application Frost, you might see a drop in RIAA intervention.
I expect that this will be a big topic of discussion at this year's ResNet conference. On the tentative list of programs there are several programs on this topic and I know of at least one BOF on it, too. We've spent a lot of time in previous years discussing this issue. It keeps coming back and getting higher and higher on our list of priorities...like a hydra whose heads grow back in pairs after we cut one off.
Kevin
Students keep smoking pot in their dorm rooms. The cops keep telling us it's not legal. How do other universities educate their students in not getting caught?
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
1. Throttle P2P traffic until it is unusably slow. The number of students using it will diminish, and those with real need to access such a network will still be able to. (It's not a violation of free speech if we force you to talk reeeeeeeeeeeeeeealllllllllyyyyy ssssssssllllllloooooowwwwwwllllllyyyyyy).
2. Block off P2P traffic to the world outside of the campus network.
3. Find out what your legal obligations are to the RIAA, and satisfy them. Use form letters wherever appropriate.
4. Punish students.
You're not going to be able to convince students to stop trading files willingly. Our university was full of people trading MP3 files in the Pre-Napster days. Attempts to curb such behavior were impossible due to the intersection of the percieved anonymity of the internet, the percieved injustices perpetuated by the record companies against the artists, a sense of entitlement due to record company pricing abuses, and a general desire to have more music on a college student's budget. The risk is low, the activity is not only morally justified but is a moral crusade, and the results are overwhelmingly positive for the student with minimal effort.
To counteract these 4 factors, record companies have been trying to flood the network, justify their pricing scheme, justify their treatment of the artists, and (recently) increase the risk to students. None of the above have been effective in convincing students to change their behavior. The various P2P networks are too large to flood with junk data, their pricing structure makes them one of the most grossly profitable industries in the US, the artists themselves complain about the treatment they recieve with many major acts filing for bankruptcy, and the RIAA has been hesitant to bring down the PR nightmare that full-scale prosecution of students and navy shipmen would create.
The best alternative to pirating copyrighted music is turning students on to public-domain or freely distributed music which a number of artists encourage as a form of advertising for live shows. But sadly the best place to find works from those artists are on P2P networks, and so the activity comes full circle.
Throttle them or block them... In this case until legal and social options are explored at a higher level, the best solution is technological.
The ______ Agenda
Many of us believe it could wind up being the final word in free speech on the internet.
AS soon as the RIAA conforms to the 4 price fixing lawsuits its lost, starts treating artists fairly instead of gouging them legally, and stops trying to stop me from playing my own fucking cds on my own fucking computer , ill stop sharing my old fleetwood mac albums.
deal?
YOu dig the deep hole FIRST, then you get your story atraight about the alibi with your associates, then you put on gloves and a mask, then you drag the RIAA out into the forest, then cock SOMEONE ELSES glock.....
Sheesh, dont you people ever learn from watching mystery movies?!?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
1. Stop listening to Britney Spears and other market driven crap. Trust me, when you are older you will have a hard time believing you ever liked that crap (disco music any one?)
2. Find indie bands that make their music available on the net and support them (tip jar, tell your friends, buy the t-shirt, go to their concerts when they come to town).
3. Short record labels' stock. They don't get it and will be left behind just like the old rail monopolies were left behind by highway trucking companies.
4. And this once for real: Enjoy and profit!
The university I work for splits the campus network up into administrative and students. Administrative being faculty and staff and such. All incomming connections, with the exception of a specific few (webserver, dns, pop3), are blocked. This nixes any potential sharing of files located on the network.
But that's only the administrative side of the network where an acceptable use policy signed by employees allows us to do that.
On the student side things are slightly trickier. The CIO and others involved in policy making don't want to be seen as too restricting on students' resources. So we can't make use of blocking all incomming connections at the firewall.
Right now we're looking at alternatives. One would be an IDS or IDP which has a signature list of file requests for popular p2p apps. A much more specialized tool rather than just blocking everything. The downside is the cost for the IDS box(es) which require a lot of memory and speed to keep things running. Stateful packet inspection and such.
But even that could be seen as being too restrictive on users. It's a very murkey area to be treading water in. Academic Freedom vs. User Protect and Privacy
Does anyone have a list of RIAA netblocks, not just the lone /24 listed at ARIN? Who does the RIAA/MPAA contract with for Kazaa "junk file" flooding etc..? The only netblock I've found for them is this one. There have to be others. I'll deny them access at our borders if I know what the netblocks are.
Stop stealing music, you inconsiderate, selfish moron.
;D
Go buy it from Apple, instead.
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
How can it be a legal notice with no signature?
----- BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE -----
Will I retire or break 10K?
As to whether 18 year olds can be accountable for anything, look at your average US Marine out of bootcamp. They understand action accountability and take it seriously.
As for encrypted P2P, check out freenet. They have been working very hard on a totally encrypted, and therefore private, solution for the entire internet... not just filesharing.
Duh.
sulli
RTFJ.
Another way you could get the RIAA off your back: throw away IP anonymity. Give each student a static address, give RIAA an IP-to-name-and-snailmail-address translation table once so they can contact people themselves, and then you don't have to be the middleman anymore. Problem solved, time freed so you can get back to work on more important things.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Deal with it!
Let the head of IT comply with the takedown notices (it's his damn job). He should do what any ISP does. If the material is hosted on a college owned machine remove it. If its student owned forward the notice to the student and threaten to revoke their access to the internet or bring them infront of the colleges review board for possible expulsion, etc... IF they keep getting complaints about them.
No. ISPs are required by the DMCA to counternotify for specific files, to notify users, to allow users to respond to the plaintiff, and to comply with the DMCA when the plaintiff has complied with the DMCA.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
They're not communication services. Which means they should have even less liability than true common carriers.
When I send a letter out, the mailperson takes it out of my hands and carries it via this route or that.
When I send an email, my email software barks at the ethernet port hoping for a useful reply. All the ISP does is route traffic according to well defined rules that they have no control over.
Or say I use web-based mail. Whose ISP is responsible? Mine? The Web Mail's ISP? The Receiver's ISP? Is the Web Mail an ISP? Really, then I can be an ISP too by installing a Network Capable Operating System like GNU OS which often includes sendmail and other goodies.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Why not reply that "Due to the insecurities of the internet and information transmitted therein, the University does not advocate nor take action with legal notices transmitted electronically." Give them a physical location to file the complaint and ask them to bring all necessary paper work at that time.