Slashdot Mirror
More on the University of Florida
setzman writes "According to this article, the University of Florida has implemented a software program known as ICARUS (Integrated Control Application for Restricting User Services) to monitor student activities on the campus network. If a user downloads music or videos the system deems to be illegal, they will lose their connection and be punished by being forced to watch industry propaganda, lengthy suspensions of access, or even a written reprimand. Yet the system hasn't resulted in an increase in CD sales? Hmm... Maybe they will figure out another way to improve their failing business model?" We covered this some months ago but the Associated Press is just catching on.
Wow. That is a name I want to base my business on.... We will have to see what the sun does to the wax that holds those wings together....
I wonder if this is one more sign of a doomed music industry. How long until they fall into the sea?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
... even more than the loss of student's privacy, is the fact that other universities have approached these people about buying this ICARUS program.
I'm all for respecting the copyright, but that doesn't extend to censoring my computer. It sounds a little shady to me. What they may end up doing is forcing students to add internet connectivity options to the college-selection process, which is a shame.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
Let me tell you first hand that this is one sneaky system. I lived in the dorms over the summer when it was implemented and they didn't even inform the students. All of the sudden my connection was just off. I wasn't downloading ANYTHING, I just had kazaa open in the background (not sharing any files).
I am one of the proud 100 students caught twice mentioned in that article. Now I have my own house off-campus with cable modem service. Hell, it beats using a proxy to destroy ICARUS (it isn't smart enough to monitor packet contents, just destination). Thank God I'm transferring to University of Michigan.
Maybe I'm missing something but I didn't think the University of Florida had a "...failing business model". Maybe they are just doing it so they don't get in trouble? They are a University and it could be argued they are well within their rights to limit their exposure.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
We covered this some months ago but the Associated Press is just catching on.
:-p
To be translated as --
We know you're gonna scream repeat, but we're gonna repeat it anyway.
This notice is to inform you that your access has been suspended to the campus network due to the fact that you have been browsing yro.slashdot.com.
In order to continue your so-called education you must sit with one of our thought process councilors to discuss your perspective on the illegal action of downloaded music.
Please go to the campus library and navigate to www.riaa.com/uflorida to register for your session.
Thank you,
Mr. Charrington
It is the universities internet connection they are providing to students, and is subject to their policies of use. If students want to download illegal content, they have the freedom to attain their own internet connection through some other means.
What's another word for Thesaurus?
-Steve Wright
Does the University of florida sell CDs? Is the drop in CD sales affecting the sources of income for the University of florida? If not, isn't this a stupid comment? If the RIAA were blackmailing the university into implementing this then I would agree that this is a rights violation, but get real: the University of Florida is perfectly well entitled to take steps to ensure it's network isn't used for illegal purposes, not to mention monitoring the use of it's resources. Yes, downloading copyrighted material is illegal, whether you think this is right or wrong. If you don't like this, go to a different university, or get a private net connection.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
It would be interesting to see if sales of CDR and DVDRs went up.
Also, what is to stop an informal, peer to peer wireless service starting up?
All the authorities probably want is to not be liable to the RIAA. They don't care whether you download songs or not, they just don't want the RIAA knocking at their door. They are also picking up the tab for all that bandwidth as well.
They probably realise that their students will get round it anyway, or if they don't, it doesn't say much for the ingenuity of UF students.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
I might not agree with what the university is doing, but in this case the university can differentiate between the private property (the computer) and the public property (the bandwidth). Note I didn't say I agree with them but at least they are making this separation to the students.
However, one thing I think the University is doing that they need to be VERY CONCERNED with for themselves (and not the students) is that they are now EDITORIALIZING. In other words, they are now saying they have looked at the content and this makes them RESPONSIBLE FOR IT. As soon as you do this, you are legally in a much worse position than you were before.
A bookstore that claims that it has reviewed the titles on its shelves is in a worse position than one that hasn't. It cannot now claim that it didn't know that there was lewd material in one of its books.
This is dangerous because once the law considers it the norm for a university to monitor its bandwidth usage (and not just the amount of bandwidth but the content), they are now open to litigation much more easily. In the end, it is possible that universities might just have to forego much of their Internet access to protect themselves legally. A lose-lose situation for everyone.
Sunny
Be my Friend
You may recall Icarus as the son of Daedalus. Daedalus was an early technological innovator, who developed wings to allow himself and his son to escape the prison they were confined in by King Minos. Minos was angry that Daedalus had given a citizen the key to the maze that Minos had required Daedalus to build for Minos' benefit. Unfortunately, Icarus tried to exploit his father's wing technology incautiously, thus bringing destruction on himself and grief and guilt to his father.
Not that there's a modern metaphor there anywhere...okay, maybe. Key:
- Daedalus = the
/. crowd
- Icarus = the general computer-using public
- wings = peer-to-peer networking
- prison = DMCA
- King Minos = RIAA/MPAA etc.
- key = DeCSS etc.
- maze = copy prevention
- incautiously = without adequate anonymity
- destruction = massive lawsuits, etc.
But you knew this...I'm not even sure where to begin but I was caught by the system. The first time around it was simply a matter of them explaining why. They set the ground rules when I spoke with them, I learned well during a 20 minute conversation with the system network admin.
:( The system got me again.
I strayed off the path a bit just recently and fired up kazaa to see if i could find some music they were playing on the university radio station. I wasn't strong enough to stay away from the copyrighted materials
I've been without inet access for a few months now, sucks but I'm getting better now. I dont think about ripping off artists much anymore and the riaa video was actually quite informative (better than my psychology classes at least.) If I can keep this up for a few more months I'll be set, I'll hopefully never consider downloading music that I dont own... Downloading music aint right and thats the truth.
...downloading copyrighted material is perfectly legal if you have permission to do so.
Even more interesting: Icarus is the child of Daedalus (a technological wizard) and Naucrate (a government whore)!
:)
But that's okay, since there's no technological wizardry or governmental whoring involved in this one, right?
I don't think the other students should have to foot the bill for those who want to use huge amounts of bandwidth. Those who want to swap can get their own, private internet connection.
When a private ISP does this, I will care.
Didn't NPR run an article on this? But NPR's article stated that using P2P AT ALL will trigger the warning.
Thats got me worried.
P2P CAN Be used as a legimate software distribution medium. i.e FreeBSD and some other free software tend to get a lot of hits on my upload queue.
So, if users were getting Linux ISO's over p2p in the university/corporate network, and this software triggers false warnings, who knows what will happen.
...because 12 year old children get sued for thousands of dollars and students "will lose their connection and be punished by being forced to watch industry propaganda, lengthy suspensions of access, or even a written reprimand.".
Sounds fair to me
I'll give you the run-down.
It monitors your connection to the kazaa network. It's nothing too fancy. If you connect, you get screwed. They run the check like every 30 minutes or something. Once detected your internet is immidiately shut off with no notice. A flier will be sent to your dorm finally informing you of what happened. The first time I had to go see the head RA of my dorm complex who was also clueless on the outage. He contacted the network people who let me know that it was the new ICARUS system and that I had to go to a webpage to reactivate my account. Upon visitning the site you are told exactly what happened, and the first time I think I got my net cut off for only 30 minutes.
The second time wasn't so pretty. Same routine (although this time I KNOW i wasnt even downloading anything or sharing, just connected to kazaa... what's the crime in that?) but different sentence. My net was cut off for 48 or 72 hours (cant remember which), and I had a judicial violation. If I violated again, I would have perm. account suspension and I would have to go before a review board.
So basically, if you are on the UF network kazaa is blocked for all intensive purposes. I don't know why they don't just BLOCK kazaa instead of screwing students over in this manner. However, I'm a student, not a suit, so what do I know, right?
I never know how to think about this sort of stuff anymore. On one hand they are breaking the law (no matter how unjustified it may seem) and it is the Universities network. I seem to remember many Uni's whining about how much bandwidth they were having to provide then finding out 80% of it was used to download music, pr0n and warez.
I mean, if you walk into a shop and steal CDs... we all know what will happen.
On the other hand, this whole music model with the RIAA (and similar organisations outside the US) sucking us dry has got to die.
So, it the downloading of music a form of protest or free speech, or is it simply breaking the laws of the land?
With all benefits of ICARUS aside, can't it be circumvented with something like Waste?
That's more or less what my university did. First, they outright blocked it. Then, someone clued in OIT about some bandwidth-throttling hardware. Now, during the day, P2P gets the dregs of bandwidth left over from normal usage, and everyone is mostly happy. This ICARUS program (from reading the comments) appears to be a roundabout way of blocking indiscriminately, except with more overhead. Go figure.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
At my school, Cornell University, they simply charge you for any bandwidth you use over 2GB/month. (At about $3/GB). Basically, you can do what you want on the net, but if you're a heavy downloader, you're going to pay to support that habit. (There have been a few people shut down, but those were the idiots downloading several feature-length movies, etc. a day, and they were shut down for using WAY too much of their dorm's available bandwidth).
And yes, there is an acceptable use policy, but as I use iTMS, that doesn't really affect me.
"I don't know why they don't just BLOCK kazaa instead of screwing students over in this manner."
Ensuring that most people will be criminals by enacting laws that the majority will break (and allowing them to break those laws), and then monitoring such activities gives you a nice power leverage.
That way if anyone becomes uncomfortable for one reason or another (entirely unrelated to the issue), you can always 'get' them with the laws they did break.
Yet the system hasn't resulted in an increase in CD sales?
More likely to have resulted in an increase in blank CD sales.
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
Hmm... Maybe they will figure out another way to improve their failing business model?
A few weeks ago, we held a forum on "Net Piracy" here at my school of Texas A&M. It wasn't really a forum, with the connotation of public discussion, but more of a presentation by the speakers. Attending were a local professor of communications, an author of a book on the subject, an MPAA vice president, and US Representative John Carter. They gave some very good speeches and then answered some presubmitted questions.
I was a pretty frustrated that I was not going to get a chance to ask a question. I had some very good ones! Then someone from the audience said something about originality, interrupting one of the speakers. The moderator asked him to clarify, and this guy in the audience launched into a diatribe about how formulaic are all the current movies and music, and how people would be more willing to pay money for it if it was more original.
Jesus Fucking Christ.
There were a lot of things that needed to be said at that forum. The US Representative was using "steal" and "pirate" as if they meant the same thing as "download" and "share." This guy is making our country's laws based on a powerful, industry-sponsored misconception. Why the hell would someone bring up this originality bullshit? That's something you complain about with your buddies. It's not something you use as justification for copyright violations before a member of the United States House of Representatives. Way to give us all a bad name, idiot.
This "failing business model" crap is just one more example of the same problem. You can sit around with your friends (or on Slashdot, if that is your only friend) and talk about how weak RIAA's and MPAA's business model is, but you don't use that as justification for breaking it.
I think the ideal would look a lot like iTunes, with all music, movies, and TV shows available for download at a low price. That would be great for everyone. The people who produce it get paid, the people who want it get it whenever they want. Guess what? That business model has a lot of potential to fail. People will download the stuff, crack its encryption, and share it. There's nothing wrong with the business model, it's the assholes you see all around you that don't follow the rules.
I resent the whining camera prop commercial they play before movies as much as the next guy, and Britney Spears spews nothing but bullshit, but seriously, they really do need to get paid. Actors get paid too much (by my standards), and music labels don't compensate musicians well, but they REALLY DO NEED TO GET PAID. There's no justification here for downloading music and movies you should be paying for. If you don't want to buy it, you don't get it. Life goes on.