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Educating Users/Students on Reducing Exposure to the RIAA

Posted by Cliff on from the keeping-a-low-profile dept.

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 !"

5 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Spam, spam, spam, wonderful spam! by Chris+Hall · · Score: 5, Funny

    >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.

  2. Ideas to throw the RIAA off ya scent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  3. You could always "protect" your traffic. by DarkVein · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:You could always "protect" your traffic. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Hmmm... this evil bit seems like a good idea. There should be a front page story about this.

  4. enough already by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    somebody please take RIAA out to a dark corner of the forest and dig a deep hole, cock your glock...