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 !"

Comments

At my university...

[CTho9305]

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.

Re:At my university...

[Orthanc_duo]

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.

Re:At my university...

[leviramsey]

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...

Re:Have you tried

[King of the World]

Oh, and while you may think I'm kidding - I very much doubt that people will do anything until it seems real to them. They wouldn't take CDs from a store, but they'll download because they think they're not being watched.

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.

What I'd do...

[NanoGator]

" 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.)

Re:What I'd do...

[jbolden]

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).

Spam, spam, spam, wonderful spam!

[Chris Hall]

>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.

Ideas to throw the RIAA off ya scent

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Mini ISP?

[Associate]

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.

Hmmm...

[shepd]

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. :-)

You could always "protect" your traffic.

[DarkVein]

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.

maybe

[drDugan]

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.

Letter of the law

[91degrees]

First, read the DMCA (might be an idea to get help from a sympathetic lawyer to translate from legalese). Make sure you are 100% compliant. See if the letter is. Specifically, (according to chillingeffects.org) the letter has to contain:

• 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.

Re:Letter of the law

[_bug_]

. 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.

Re:Have you tried being a retard? clearly..

[King of the World]

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.

How to stop attracting attention?

[ccady]

... 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? ...

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?