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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 !"
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.
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
Oh, that's the most effective thing the RIAA could do. Forget suing users. Convince universities (especially Unis) and maybe a cable ISP or two to cap uploads at 2GB per month in their base packages, which would effectively force users on those nets to disable uploading or throttle uploading to 500 bytes/second, forcing more of the upload traffic onto users on non-capped providers.
Because of the bandwidth spike on the non-capped providers, more of those will start to implement capping of some sort, or those sharing will see how much of their bandwidth is being eaten up by KaZaa et al and deactivate their sharing. The end result is that most of the uploading will be done by people who are leasig dedicated servers hooked up to T3's. These are naturally easier to go after (and there's a lot fewer of them).
Now if only the *AA had the brains to do it...
. Usually they don't sign these because the complainant isn't the RIAA. See what happens if you respond asking for a compliant letter.
This is exactly what the college I work for does. We receive dozens of e-mails a week from RIAA representatives or people working on their behalf. Not once has one of these e-mails contained an electronic signature. What we do is reply to the sender stating we can take no action because their letter is incomplete under the DMCA.
This has been going on for over a year now.
We have yet to get a single response back.
The RIAA does not argue you don't have the right to transfer your rights to your music. They argue you don't have the right to copy it except for under limited circumstances. So
1) buying the CD is legal
2) making the copy on your own computer is legal only if you agree to limit certain activities your computer engages in
3) When you don't limit those activities you violate (2).