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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 !"
>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!
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.
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.
- 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.