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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 !"
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
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."
>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.
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!
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
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.
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
In case you completely forgot, this is exactly what those 4 college students were charged with doing - at $97,000,000,000 each. Great advice buddy!
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
Are digital signatures legally binding?
In those states where digital signatures are not yet binding, it soon will be. This page lists the legal status of digital signatures in all sorts of jurisdictions. On the page, pull down the menu and select "United States [All States]".
And you still have no way to guarantee delivery
Perhaps SMTP does not guarantee delivery, but the instant message protocols already do. Future instant message protocols will allow for cryptographically signed communication.
Will I retire or break 10K?