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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 !"
So watch them before the RIAA do, and make a big deal about it. If you don't want to go public that's fine, but make sure all the students know that the law could be watching as easily as you were. Also, if handled right, you can come off as the good guy.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
" 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."
Yay lets all encourage leaching... If your are going to download you should cotribute somthing to the network. If everyone decided to not share anything so as to reduse their bandwidthe there would be nothing on any of the P2P networks.
That *would* be an interesting tactic, and it's probably in the RIAA's tactic book. Leech the people who offer shares to blazes.
The 'consensus model' could suck real bad as things unravel. Probably will.
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
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.
You don't think that's what the RIAA would like to see happen?
If anything is going to be the "death" of P2P I think it'll be that. The casual user will probably stop sharing after one threatening letter from an ISP. People already run mods to the P2P apps which shut down downloads by leechers. Eventually you'll have a few brave souls willing to play dodgeball with their ISPs (or operating offshore) providing for hundreds of leechers who will be constantly trying to get all they can without giving anything.
Sound like anything familiar? Like, oh, warez/MP3 on the web or ftp?
The RIAA et al will never kill P2P no more than they can kill other distribution mechanisms. All they can do is make it so Joe Sixpack still has to go buy their product most of the time.
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
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.
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