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Universities Developing Internal, Controlled P2P System
sukottoX writes "Penn State along with MIT and the University of British Columbia are developing a P2P application (called LionShare in the PSU incarnation) to be used only by students, faculty and staff. According to this article at the Penn State Daily Collegian, the file-sharing program, which wouldn't be completed until 2005 at the earliest, would log each transaction, allowing illegal use of the network to be traced. The purpose of this is to lessen the load on servers for tasks such as professors sending files to students, thereby decreasing the amount of manpower necessary to administer them. Funding will come in part by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, as well as from the students' information technology fee."
As a casual observer I have to say that this would seem to strengthen the RIAA's point. By developing their own solution when others would seem to already exist, these colleges lend weight to the notion that the existent services are not designed for "legitimate use", but rather for what they are used for now: Illegitimate use, in the eyes of the RIAA.
Anyway, thats just one possible view of this.
Yes, this is true. I make my lectures available to students as Powerpoint files, which get very large, especially with animations and videos. These files are too large to send via email. Right now we do it via a course webpage, but with the amount of data being distributed I can see how this is not the best way to do it. It would also be nice to share large datasets with colleagues more easily....