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Solutions for University File Sharing?
bbulzibar asks: "Indiana University, like many other Universities, is struggling to deal with P2P file sharing. At a recent meeting, faculty, staff, and administration were convinced that 'the University is going to have to take some sort of action in the future [to eliminate illegal activity on the university's network].' With no student input, I can only imagine the worst happening (limiting data transfer, suing students, taking funds out of the student technology fee). What kind of a solution could be recommended by a proactive student in order to avoid an ugly 'solution' and loss of file sharing, yet reasonable enough that the University will accept it? IU has outlined 4 options at the meeting. Your thoughts?"
you 'inform' the students that they need to share files within the network, and then the geekiest of them will run to setup a Direct Connect hub that's restricted to the university network. of course, the IT departments can't control the content, but atleast the bandwith won't be clogged up.
If bandwidth is the issue, then selective rate limiting is probably your only sane option. And I'm not talking about quashing speeds to 3K/s. It sounds like you want to be reasonable, and that's good; the students will respect you more, and will be less likely to try to overthrow their fascist IT overlords.
If piracy is the issue, (and it sounds from your notes like it is), there really is nothing you can do about it except block those ports. Even if you provide them with free & legal file-trading resources, the piracy will still continue.
And remember: no matter what you do, there will always be some smart stundent who finds a way around it.
I agree with this premise, and further I agree with the ideas presented by IU. If they want students to stop using p2p, they had better get their act together and put together a good looking package. I don't really see what's wrong with providing students with deals on legal downloads while strongly recommending it. This is okay as long as they don't actually stop p2p use. If they stop p2p, then many times many legal actions I do would be impossible. Unless they shut out more than just p2p useage (i.e. other used ports, SSH for tunnels etc), then there will be even more issues with general usability of their network on top of general disgust with conventional p2p blockage.
Nothing in that article really defines what they intend to do with real infringement, I think people assume far too much when somebody cries p2p. As a student of IU, I also know that treating their students as criminals will cause issues. I'd just assume go elsewhere to finish my schooling if they start doing that.
At the university where I work, we've taken a multi-pronged approach:
-Education. We include a "sharing copyrighted stuff is bad, mmmkay" lecture for all incoming students, and we make anyone caught sharing illegal stuff sit through it again. We tell people about the spyware in most file-sharing apps. We also include "how to turn off uploading and be a leech" in our user documentation because we know they'll do it anyway.
-Per-user bandwidth limits of 1GB/day. We had to do this for other reasons, but it had a significant impact on file-sharing.
-We use a packet shaper to give popular file-sharing ports the lowest priority without setting a hard bandwidth limit. That strikes the users as reasonable (since there's no hard cap), and it keeps the network usable.
-We slap the users hard when an RIAA/MPAA/whoever copyright violation warning comes in. If we get a copyright violation notice, you lose network access for the rest of the semester (and next semester too if it's close to the end of the semester). You can still work from the public labs, but not from your dorm. We do this for one simple reason: the RIAA knows our policy and we have a reputation with them as hard-asses. This means that we can reply to their messages with "problem resolved" and they believe us without pushing the matter, demanding personal info, or taking students to court. The students don't like it until we explain the alternatives to them.
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